Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 03:32:43 -0500
From: "Richard Woods" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1036
Gordon Spence wrote:
> 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)
[snip]
>
> 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.
I think there's a fairly well-established consensus that in
the context of GIMPS/Primenet, "to poach" means "to run a
(L-L, usually) test while it is assigned by Primenet to a
different GIMPS participant" or something similar. There's
another consensus that Primenet assignments mean something
like a reservation as is used in other cooperative
computational projects to avoid duplicated effort.
I think we all agree on how it's supposed to work and indeed does work for 99.9999+% of the exponents. It was also correctly pointed out a while ago when this first cropped out (hi Aaron) about three years ago, that they are after all *just numbers*. Nobody owns them and anyone in the world can work on whatever they want without anyone's permission. Don't lose sight of that fact.
> 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.
So, unlike many other poachers who've declared themselves
and their motives on this list or in the GIMPS Forum, you
wouldn't care whether any of those exponents were, say,
only 2 days from completion by the Primenet assignee? Is
that correct? You wouldn't take the trouble to distinguish
between an assignment that has an estimated 2 days to
completion and one that had 200 days to completion?
If anyone wanted to systematically poach, then that is a very simple approach. Most checks would be double-checks, all the rest - in reality very few - would be triple-checks. Anything that adds to the sum total knowledge is *always* a gain to the world of science, even if it is a loss to an individual somewhere. Indeed with some simple scripting it would be fairly easy to automate.
[snip]
> Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club
> of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime?
As long as you could be trusted by system administrators
not to poach, sure.
Is there any particularly _special_ relationship between
being a Mersenne prime discoverer and being trusted not to
poach?
Unless there is some such special relationship, I imagine
that thousands of non-discoverers could also be trusted not
to poach.
Well in actual fact, there *is* now that you come to mention it. As a Mersenne Prime discoverer I am given immediate notification of any new MP immediately it is reported, ie *before* it is verified. We are trusted to keep it quiet.....because when we discovered ours we proved that we were capable of _discretion_
