>From: George Woltman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Nathan Russell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Mersenne: searching the biggies
>Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 11:39:44 -0500
>
>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).
I feel that I appreciate the excitement of doing the first-time tests, and
that is why I am chosing to do those. I don't honestly think I would have
the patience to run 10 M tests, and if I were in it for the money (which I'm
not) I would calculate that the regular tests actually have a higher
expected prize yield per time.
I actually just got 2 weeks' worth of factoring for myself, just for
variety's sake.
>
>>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.
>
That is true. I was stating my own views, and I respect that others may
have different motives.
>>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.
I am aware that there was a bug in V 17. There will always be bugs. The
bugs (plural) that occured in my former project were merely the final reason
that I decided to leave.
Nathan
>
>>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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