I honestly thought that the long term goal (maybe not by this panel but for
others) was to factor all these numbers and that we were setting/recording a
lower boundary for that effort.
Carleton Garrison
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian J. Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "CARLETON GARRISON" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: Mersenne: P-1
> On 23 Jul 2001, at 19:13, CARLETON GARRISON wrote:
>
> > The name of the game is validate - by duplication. You cannot
> > make a
> > case without duplicating the result. This is to safeguard against the
> > many gremlins that can occur - faulty overclocked CPUs, etc.
>
> But the only thing that goes wrong if a factor is missed is that a LL
> test gets run unneccessarily. It simply isn't worth rerunning all the
> factoring on the offchance that a small number of runs will "glitch"
> & miss a factor.
>
> If the error rate of LL tests is about 1% then P-1, being much
> shorter, should be less than 0.1%. Trial factoring doesn't use the
> FPU much, so the processor will probably run much cooler & errors may
> be even less likely than that.
>
> The point is that _even if factoring is omitted altogether_ LL & DC
> will still eliminate a composite number. The purpose of doing
> factoring is to _save time_ by eliminating LL testing for those
> numbers where finding a factor is "cheap enough" to be "cost
> effective".
>
> > If
> > someone finds a factor, someone ofer a PrimeNet can do a single
> > division case and confirm the result.
>
> The server already does that automatically! The time required to
> _check_ a factor is miniscule.
>
>
> Regards
> Brian Beesley
>
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