Nathan Russell wrote: > 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.
But with regard to Primenet poaching, there is a crucial difference from each of the three cases you cite. Within Primenet, just as within many other distributed computational projects, there is a reserving/assigning system for the purpose of minimizing unnecessary duplication or overlap of work. The cases of conflict you cite had no such method for avoiding duplication/overlap. Early GIMPS and the other project (Slowinski/Cray) had no common agreement or method for avoiding duplication. Darwin and the other guy (Wallace) had made no arrangement to work on separate theories. Edison was in frank competition with other inventors; he wouldn't have even tried to cooperate for nonduplication, I think. However, Primenet cannot _enforce_ its nonduplication/nonoverlap policy. Primenet can control exclusiveness of its assignments (who shall perform this work unit), but the exclusiveness of its reservations (only one participant shall perform this work unit while assigned) depends on voluntary cooperation by participants. "Poaching", in the Primenet context, is noncooperation with the voluntary, cooperative reservation rules. > If a 'poacher' beat me to a prime I'd be very upset. That's one reason why some of us want to prevent poaching if possible. > It's not likely to happen to me, because I run an Athlon XP 2000+ Yes, "slow" systems are more likely to get poached. So users with "slow" systems may be more motivated to try to prevent poaching than users with "fast" systems. > That doesn't mean poaching is right, it does mean you're making > yourself something of a tempting target. Increasing the difficulty for a poacher to _find_ a tempting target would mean other participants could be less concerned about making themselves into such a target, and just concentrate on doing the work they considered most suitable within the rules. Richard Woods _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
