Because for the simple reason that as long as you check in at least once every 60 days, then your exponent will *never* time-out, expire and be reassigned to someone else. Witness this (taken from the assigned exponents report two minutes ago)From: "Richard Woods" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Mersenne: Poaching -- Discouragement thereofHere's what I've just posted in the GIMPS Forum. - - - - _IF_ PrimeNet has automatic time limits on assignments, ordinarily requiring no manual intervention to expire assignments or re-assign them,
7104967 D 64 449.7 905.6 41.6 17-Dec-02 07:13 01-Nov-01 00:26
Run-time of nearly 15 months already and 29 months to go.
[snip]
Of course, as this is a *public* volunteer project, there are a lot of us, who have been in the project for a long-time (6+ years) who regularly look through these for no other reason than we *want* to.If there's no non-poaching non-administrating user's need-to-know for those items, then just stop including them in public reports. Include them only in administrative reports and private password-requiring individual reports.
No. If I was setting out to "poach" numbers - which in itself is a moot point. You don't *own* an exponent, they are after all simply numbers. However, I digress. If I was setting out to "poach" numbers, then I would simply setup a few 3.06 Ghz P4's and just start at the bottom of the list (smallest exponents) and let rip. Complete an exponent every day or so. So some of them might be completed before me, so what, we then have a "triple" check. If someone wants to do it, you won't stop them.That would deny target-selecting information to would-be poachers, right?
You are missing the point about it being useful to have "triple" checks. Nothing is redundant.I'm not claiming this would stop poaching, just that it denies poachers the information they currently use (I presume) to select straggling assignments to poach. A poacher could still target the assignments of userids that had historicallly been slow or simply the ones he/she'd poached before, but then runs a greater risk of poaching a LL that's actually on-schedule, perhaps even one that's running on that user's freshly-upgraded faster system the poacher doesn't know about. Then the would-be poacher might need to consider that his/her efforts would (a) fail to "help" achieve milestones, and (b) more obviously interfere with GIMPS's orderly progress. (We could help the denser poachers figure this out by publishing this reasoning. :) )
Are you putting yourself forward as one of the trusted individuals? Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime?- - - - Indeed, couldn't my suggestion be done NOW? Make the current assignments report password-protected, then substitute a new public assignments report that omits the above four items. Do the system administrators currently need the eyes and attention of others to detect stragglers _about whom action needs to be taken_? If not, then why provide this information to poachers? If so, just give some other trusted individuals the password for the full assignments report.
Yes, this is an open public project done in the spirit of discovery. Denying many thousands access to data that only a handful of people would use for "unapproved" reasons seems rather drastic.Does anyone see any problem with this scheme? (... other than that some individuals' curiosities would go unsatisfied?)
Gordon Spence
M2976221
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