On 13 Jun 99, at 16:32, Sturle Sunde wrote:
> When a person tells the world which exponents he is testing, and
> continously reports his progress, people could at least complain to him
> before hijacking the exponents he has been testing for a year with the
> dream of becoming a discoverer of the next Mersenne prime. Stealing the
> exponent on purpose without even sending him an email is just plain wrong.
Hear hear.
> I, at least, would change to another project very quickly if the now very
> well coordinated Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is turned into an
> anarchy were people are encouraged to cheat.
This is an excellent point, I think we ought to take notice. It's
certainly p*ss*d me off a bit with the Proth project to find that,
out of 4 primes I've discovered, 2 are "rediscoveries" of numbers
that other people have been working on without reserving ranges via
the perfectly satisfactory facilities provided. I'll be dumping Proth
& moving that P100 system to something else when the range I'm
working on at the moment finishes. Probably ECM.
Could I suggest that we do something to help those people with non-
internet connected machines (or possibly machines which have to run
LL testing clients which have no server support) to keep their
progress up to date. I have a Sun Sparc 2 which has been double
checking using MacLucasUNIX for a while now, it takes about 10 weeks
to run a test on an exponent around 2 million. The problem is, if I
use the manual testing pages, it expires after 60 days & gets
reallocated. I found a workaround, viz. to use a "dummy" setup on
another system running Prime95 to supply "dummy" progress reports,
but it's a bit messy and inconvenient.
I'd like to suggest:
(a) the expiry period for exponents allocated using the manual pages
is extended from 60 days - say to 120 days
(b) an extra form is added to the PrimeNet Manual Exponent page, so
that progress reports can be supplied manually on behalf of clients
which can't do it automatically. (Don't even need to give a
completion date really - just to say "I'm still alive" & keep the
exponent reserved for another "expiry period" - but should have an
optional field for estimated completion date, if known)
Obviously this is "second best" to providing everyone with PrimeNet-
aware clients (and permanent, free-to-use, _secure_ Internet
connections), but I don't see that as being a realistic target in the
short to medium term.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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