> I think few of us fully realize the _enormous_ amount of (highly
> optimized) processing required each iteration to achieve something that
> looks so simple: a squaring, minus 2, mod (2^p-1).
> Whatever the correct figure, the program doesn't show you what it's doing.
This is an interesting point - not so much whether a gui would be nice or
not, but, what would it show? A progress bar, maybe... anything else? There
isn't really anything else to show. Intermediate results of the LL test
don't themselves have a lot of meaning (even the final result, if non-zero,
is devoid of much interpretation). There's not a lot you could plot - a
graph of the iteration time would only serve to show when you opened
Microsoft Word or something...
I must admit, I dallied (albeit very briefly) with the bovine rc5 client.
Were it not for their peculiar statistics ('if keys were drops of water, we
could flood the world in a week' etc) I'd have got bored of the effort a lot
sooner than I did. The SETI client looks pretty (more of a screen burner
than a screen saver though) but the display is at best meaningless, a waste
of cycles at best.
I think we ought to count ourselves lucky that what we've got is bare-bones
and low-impact.
Chris Nash
Lexington KY
UNITED STATES
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