Hi,
I think you should be very careful about how much graphical information is
to be represented.
I have just joined GIMPS recently after using SETI@home. That program has a
nice graphical interface, but many people, my self included, spent much time
and effort to either disable the display, or use a text only version and
various tweaking to speed the machine up. The reason for this is that it
takes a great many CPU cycles to perform the display, cycles that would be
better spent doing the testing. In the case of SETI@home a speed increase of
around 300% was obtained by not having the display!!
Don't get me wrong I would like to see some more information about what is
going on, but not at the expense of loosing time.
Regards,
>Jukka Santala <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Friday 24 September 1999 at 5:25
>PM:
>
>> Though you ask this, I find the topic rather appropriate for the list,
>> especially given the angle of "HOW can we visualize the process of
>> mathemathical operations.
>
>That brings me to the following observation:
>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).
>Remember, you see nothing happening! Prime just tells you: I used
>so-and-so-many BILLION clock cycles on the previous iteration. When a
>computer is ray-tracing (preferrably on some fancy high-end workstation)
>you are immediately dazzled by the picture-perfect pixels appearing on the
>screen in brilliant colours.
>But your result is not for eternity. In GIMPS it is. M7xxxxxx tested.
>Composite. Or: M10yyyyyy trial-factored to 2^65. No factors below 2^65.
>And you know that YOU discovered that mathematical fact.
>That little 64bit residue or checksum is precious. If you had a grain of
>rice for the number of clock cycles needed to produce just one of those
>bits, you could feed the entire (current) world population for a whole
>year! Is that about right?
>Whatever the correct figure, the program doesn't show you what it's doing.
>Actually, it might be interesting to be able to see, say, just the last
>64 bits (in hex) of the current number L[n] in the Lucas sequence. The
>program displays those bits for L[p-1], right? So why not during the
>sequence?
>The program should IMHO at least -optionally- display a progress bar
>showing graphically what it now only shows in digits:
>progress on current exponent [95.2% completed]. The bar would probably
>grow one pixel longer every couple of hours.
>Any comments on the issue of graphical visualisation?
>
>Cheers,
>Robert van der Peijl
>
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Mike,
--
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A very rare atlas found at the Godlee Observatory
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