Hi,
At 11:42 PM 3/2/00 -0500, Nathan Russell wrote:
>>Nathan Russell asked: How much are the people who are trying to
>>find a 10 million digit prime contributing to the search?
I agree that all machines are contributing to our knowledge of Mersenne
numbers. The gaps will eventually be closed.
Since you're a relative newbie, the overriding goal of GIMPS has always
been "have fun". That translates into doing the type of work that most
interests you (as long as we all do the work in a coordinated manner).
>That is precisely why I switched to GIMPS from another project whose sole
>purpose was to simply recover a cute little, probably political, saying
>that someone had hidden.
There are those that view prime number hunting as equally useless. I don't
view GIMPS as in competition with other distributed projects. The links at
http://www.mersenne.org let you choose the project that is most appealing
to you. All are worthy in their own way.
>Two of their other projects lost GIMPS-years of work each because of
>stupid bugs and I got fed up and left.
Uh... we had a bug too. Ironically, it was announced on April Fools Day
last year. That caused quite a stir. We lost roughly a GIMPS month of
work.
>This may seem like flamebait, and I do not intend it that way.
Welcome aboard and good luck with your LL tests - but most importantly...
Have fun,
George
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