Mersenne: Poaching and related issues...

[Nathan Russell]

Okay, to start with, GIMPS lost the very first prime we ever found to a member of another project who beat George to finding the exponent by a matter of hours. This is simply the way math and other fields of research work. Darwin's theory of evolution was very nearly duplicated by another researcher working independently. So were some of Edison's improvements on the telegraph.

If a 'poacher' beat me to a prime I'd be very upset. It's not likely to happen to me, because I run an Athlon XP 2000+ and never do reissued double-checks. I occasionally do reissued first-time tests, but when I commit to doing such an assignment I get it done fairly quickly (right now there's a large queue of work for my machine ID Bucephalus, but note that I reordered the assignments so the double-checks get done first, then the reissued first-time checks, and only then the 10 Mdigit exponent that I really want to do.

I think common sense is the best approach here. If you're using a machine that's below the 686 range, trying to grab reissued exponents below 7.5 M or so is probably not the safest thing to do. That doesn't mean poaching is right, it does mean you're making yourself something of a tempting target. The same is true if you have over 90 days of work queued (which I'm ashamed to admit I presently do).

I'd like to point one more thing out to the 'poachers'. 'Poaching' may increase your chance of finding a prime over doing regular assignments by ten or fifteen percent, but it really does very little to help the project - it forces someone's work to go to waste. If there is a 386 out there checking an exponent in the 16M range that turns out to coorespond with a prime, that's fine. Eventually the happy news will be turned in to the server. In the meantime, the rest of us have the same chance of finding a prime that we'd have if that exponent were returned tomorrow.

Nathan
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