On 1 Dec 2001, at 17:47, Alexander Kruppa wrote: > Warut Roonguthai wrote: > > > > http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/11302001/grapha.htm > > > > Look like the cat is out of the bag now - it's 2^13,466,917 - 1. Was > this early publication indended? I thought the press release was due > only after the independent double check completed, but then they quote > Tim Cusak of Entropia, which makes it sound like an official > announcement. Or is the official double check finished already?
Umm. If this is true I'm _very_ annoyed about the leakage. My hope is that it _isn't_ true that the exponent is 13466917. "Official" supporting evidence is admittedly thin, but that Mersenne number has 4,053,946 digits - if that was true, I would have expected George's initial announcement to say "over 4 million digits" rather than "well over 3.5 million digits" (which would nevertheless be true!). Of course I could simply be misreading George's mind - possibly if he had said "over 4 million" it would have narrowed the field sufficiently to make identification easy. But is it _really_ too much to ask people to wait just one more week for the official verification run to complete? Maths isn't like politics, what's true today won't be different tomorrow... I would strongly suggest that procedures are changed so that the next time a Mersenne prime is discovered, no information at all is released except to prior discoverers of Mersenne primes and any others (at George's discretion) who might be in a position to do the official verification run. Incidentally I did reply to a request for information about M39 which appeared on the NMBRTHRY list yesterday morning. I was very, very careful to include no information which has not been released by George in his messages to this list, and I made sure George got a copy of my reply. Irritated Brian Beesley _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
