On the subject of people with older machines despairing: on a Sun workstation my
primitive-trinomial program takes about 10 hours (but depending on how many
other engineers are using the machine) to test a q value for Richard Brent's
distributed computing project. (It is to find primitive trinomials x^p + x^q +
1 over GF(2) where p is a Mersenne exponent.) I recommend this project highly
for GIMPS folks because these trinomials are actually useful, and, as far as I
know, they are the only actual application of finding Mersenne primes. (These
trinomials are important in making pseudorandom number generators.) It is even
imaginable that the project could "catch up" with GIMPS because new work is only
created when a Mersenne prime is found.
So, if you'd like to put slow machines to good use, follow the "Other Projects"
link and then the "search for primitive trinomials" link on the page you arrive
at.
Mike Yoder
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