A nasty thought just struck me.
It's well known that factors of M(p) are of the form 2kp+1.
It's also well known that factors found by the P-1 algorithm are of the form
(product of powers of small primes) + 1 where "small" means less than an
arbitrarily chosen limit B1. I omit stage 2 from consideration here.
When applying P-1 to mersenne numbers, an additional 2*p ought to be
included in the product, over and above all the powers of prime < B1. Can
anyone who knows for certain reassure me that this has been done for the
prime95 V20 implementation?
If it hasn't been done, my computation for the QA effort on M(42282367) with
B1 = 1000000 has been a waste of a week's cpu.
Paul
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