-----Original Message-----
From: Shot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 12 March 2001 07:32
Subject: Mersenne: Quitting GIMPS
>- LL tests take a long time to complete. Current exponent will take
>four months on my machine - a little too much for me....
I last returned a result on 6 December, but I may have finished it several
days earlier. My current exponent (5151593) is scheduled to complete in three
days time, so that's nearly three and a half months. My next (6193307) is
expected to finish 18 August - five months - though I'll have replaced my PC
before then. I joined the project on Feb 28 1999. I've returned just 12 DCs
and 6 factorisations efforts. I have found no factors. I contribute a little
under 13 P90 hours/day.
OK, so I'm running it on an abacus. :-) I'm Slow But Reliable. I'm glad to
read that it isn't us SBRs that are holding up the project.
>...Yes, I know, I
>can do double checks of factor, but, let's face it - _for me_ double
>checks are not *that* thrilling,...
Somebody's got to do them.
>...and only 10% of factoring time is
>'counted' (right?).
0% of OGR searching time is counted in the Primenet top producer tables. :-)
>- Errors. I recently added some more RAM to my computer, and the
>first module I bought was bad - before I managed to run the torture
>test it affected (or not) my four months of searching with
>sum(inputs) != sum(outputs) and round off errors. It was my mistake
>(I should've turned Prime95 off before inserting the new RAM), but it
>was unreversable.
What you 'should've done' is back up your data.
>- Ranking. Well, distributed.net's way of counting work is much more
>'sexy' - in distributed.net I'll be returning work much more often,
>and I'll get credited for it every day. Maybe if PrimeNet could count
>every iteration (and switch for daily, instead of hourly, statistics -
>there are reasons for doing it), or we could come with some other
>way to credit work more often.
Personally I think all the 'credits' and 'rankings' business is irrelevant
fluff...
...but if I were a top 100 producer, then I'd think it was /very important/.
:-)
>- Money. No, I'm not in it for money - OGR is the only
>distributed.net's project that has no cash prize. At least that
>much... ;?)
It's easier to buy a lottery ticket. Probably cheaper too.
>Any comments to above are welcome - I'm not going to quit reading
>GIMPS mailing list (at least not it the list moderator decides to
>unsubscribing me). ;?)
I don't see why he/she should. According to the welcome message "This list is
for discussion of the computation of Mersenne primes." There's nothing there
about being a GIMPS participant.
I can't see any reason why anyone should be offended by your decision. It's
not as if anyone's life depends upon the discovery of the next Mersenne prime.
You're not abandoning distributed computing - you're moving to a different
project. And searching for OGR seems to be as laudable - and as useless - as
searching for Mersenne primes.
>I'll try to write a letter in a month or two with my thoughts about
>differencies between GIMPS and OGR search.
I look forward to that.
Cheers,
-- Shot
Daran G.
_________________________________________________________________________
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