On Sat, 12 May 2001 16:04:17 -0400, Jud McCranie wrote:
>At 03:26 PM 5/12/2001 -0400, Nathan Russell wrote:
>I think that's more of a 'quick fix', and might make new participants
>>feel that GIMPS doesn't trust them.
>
>Yes, but a new user need not know that they don't get an exponent that has
>expired until they have finished an assignment. My point is that if an
>exponent is dropped, it could be reassigned to someone that has shown a
>willingness to finish it.
However, that is still drawing a distinction between new and
experienced users. For that matter, if a milestone is delayed by a
month or two, it doesn't significantly hurt everyone's overall odds of
finding a prime.
>I've been steadily working on GIMPS for nearly 5 years, always 1 fulltime
>machine, occasionally 2. I've been doing doublechecks in the 6,000,000
>range for a few months because I use a 300 MHz machine. I know
>doublechecking is important. But then I see these few gaps under M38? and
>I think "I could have done several of those."
I can empathize with you here. However, I was a new user only a
little over a year ago, and if someone had said on the mailing list at
that time that new users should be given assignments chosen so that
they couldn't harm milestones, I would have been upset.
Yes, it would be nice to say that we know for sure which Mersenne
prime is the thirty-eighth, but doing so does not speed us towards
discovering the thirty-ninth.
For that matter, I am sure that there are users who have run a single
exponent and then left, though they may not be as many as those who
left without ever finishing any exponents.
Nathan
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