At 7 Sep 2000 14:25:49 -0000, "Brian J. Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>The problem could be a program bug (unlikely), an undiscovered bug in
>either Athlon or Pentium III floating-point arithmetic (again
>unlikely) or a random hardware glitch in either my system or the
>system against which I'm checking (much the most likely).
Or we might just be unlucky. There are inputs for which the
multiplication used in prime95 will not give the correct answer --
fortunately they are very rare and it is very unlikely that any would ever
be encountered. (It isn't worth using safe multiplications because any
problems will show up in the double check anyway.)
I agree that a random hardware glitch is by far the most likely, but the
possibility of unlucky values should be kept in mind.
Colin Percival
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