On 22 Jan 00, at 11:35, Gerry Snyder wrote:
> But finding a factor (or another factor) of a Mersenne number would seem
> more real.
>
> Is there any significant probability that two 500 MHz Celerons and one 333
> MHz Celeron could accomplish such a feat in a couple of years?
Depends where you look - last summer I found tens of thousands of
smallish factors of Mersenne numbers in the 10 million digit range in
a few minutes on a PII-350. On the other hand, many, many CPU years
have been spent by various people trying to find any factor of the
relatively small composite Mersenne number 2^727-1 without success.
You get kudos in proportion to the "difficulty" of the task you
achieve (essentially this depends on luck, though you can help it
along by supplying as much "horsepower" as possible). However, so far
as I'm concerned, the main idea is to have fun.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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