On 20 Sep 99, at 1:06, Rick Pali wrote:
> The only question that comes to mind is if you had to plough through
> factoring before you got to the LL test...but then I realise that you still
> wouldn't be done if that were true.
You don't have to pre-factor, if you choose "Test" or "Time" from the
"Advanced" menu.
>
> I signed up for an exponent in the 33mil range and the factoring alone took
> 13 days on a P3-500.
Ah, so we're maybe not doing enough trial factoring. I guess your
completion time is about a year; trial factoring should take between
5% and 10% of the time for a LL test, & 13 days is only about 3.5%. I
think we should probably go one bit deeper, this would double the
trial factoring time - but would save the whole year, if you managed
to find a factor.
> I'd originally does it for testing purposes, but after
> that I've just got to let it continue. :-)
Well, why not?
>
> In a year's time, I'd love to see some numbers on how many signed up for tem
> million digit numbers and later quit for smaller exponents...
I think you need to be a true enthusiast to take on a single test
taking ~ 1 year. Lots (attracted by ca$h) won't realise what it
means, for a week or two, & may then drop out 8-( To avoid this
happening to too many people, I think we should be a bit more upfront
that testing a 10 million digit number is going to take about a year,
even on a state-of-the-art system.
I have several fastish systems - a couple of them are running QA
stuff at the moment - I may voluntarily take on a 10 million digit
number on _one_ of them, but I certainly wouldn't choose to run tests
of that length on _all_ of them!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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