You wrote:
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 21:41:54 -0500 From: "Richard Woods" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1037
[snip]
Having read your entire post half a dozen times to try and workout exactly what point you were trying to make, I'll have a go at answering them.> > I think we all agree on how it's supposed to work So you agree that there should be no poaching of Primenet assignments - -- right? Or by "it", were you not including Primenet?
1. Personally, I don't see any harm in "poaching" per se, I have had it happen to me. That's life and the way it goes. As I stated earlier, when information is discovered humanity as a whole gains. Period. Look at the big picture.
2. "It" does refer to the GIMPS project.
3. GIMPS or Primenet or whatever. For the umpteenth time. A number is a number. Period. Regardless of whether you or anybody else has checked it out or not. It may be (and is) officially discouraged, but as things stand, the "rules of the game" as we are playing them (ie the way the check-in system *actually* works) allows it to happen.[snip] > they are after all *just numbers*. Nobody owns them and So by "they" and "them" you _do_ mean just the numbers, without any consideration of GIMPS or Primenet - correct?
4. Get it into perspective. The number of times this actually happens is miniscule. Out of the millions we have checked what are the "poached" items? Dozens, a few hundred??
5. It has correctly been pointed out that life doesn't end if a milestone slips. Well guess what? That is a double-edged sword - life doesn't end if an exponent gets poached either.
6. Now go back and read the license.txt file again, and this time actually take the time to read and understand it. It specifically excludes liability in the event of poaching. It does *NOT* say the you mustn't do it. The only rules that you agree to be bound by are those in deciding how the cash-prize is split up.> anyone in the world can work on whatever they want Well, sure. But that's irrelevant to my proposal. My proposal concerned the GIMPS/Primenet system, not the whole world. > without anyone's permission. Isn't there something in the current GIMPS/Primenet software along the lines of "if you use our software, you agree to abide by our rules"?
It's actually more complicated, and it wasn't there in its present form when you used GIMPS software to discover that 2^2976221 - 1 is prime, but isn't that the gist of the current provision?
7. No, see item 6 above.
8. If I were setting myself up to be a "serial poacher" as suggested above, then you are absolutely correct. A little bit of scripting to feed exponents into each cpu as it completed a work unit, then sit back and watch the trailing-edge of the project go rocketing forwards.[snip] >> > 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? 1) Do you care to give us a direct answer to any of the questions I posed in the above paragraph, so that we have a clearer idea of just what you were referring to when you used "that" in your next sentence?
9. Either that or by manually generating such a list from several publicly available repositories of such information. Manual here of course means some scripting to do file manipulation, you could even do it dBASE3 if you felt like it.2) When you wrote "bottom of the list", were you referring to a list derived from a Primenet-generated report?
> If anyone wanted to systematically poach, then that is a > very simple approach. By "that", do you mean an approach that excludes checking whether any of the Primenet assignments were very close to completion?
10. Yes. [snip]
11. Life is all about luck, or being in the right place at the right time. Unfair? Perhaps, reality? Yes. My point is that there are a small number of people who we know for 100% certain can be trusted to act with discretion when "sensitive" information is involved. I am sure that everyone else can, but using your own argument against you....Only the very, very few people who had the luck to choose, or to be assigned, to L-L test a Mersenne number that happened to be prime, along with a small number of others who were directly involved in the verification process, have had the very exclusive chance to demonstrate their discretion during the post-discovery verification phase. None of the other thousands of GIMPS participants have been given even a _chance_ to demonstrate that particular, very exclusive type of discretion. Can none of the latter category be trusted not to poach?
...."let's strip everything out of the reports not to aid the cheats (poachers)" was the gist of your argument. By inference therefore it is quite *obvious* that _YOU_ do not trust any person involved in this project not to poach.
12. See item 11 above. That's the trouble with climbing into a pulpit to preach to others, it often has a habit of swinging back around and biting you.Is there any special reason _why_ discretion during the Mersenne prime verification process should have a stronger correlation with nonpoaching trustworthiness than any other demonstration of discretion has?
And before you go off and waste hours trawling through all the masses of data on the project files to try and work out if I have ever poached any numbers, I'll save you the bother. Yes I have. How many? - can't remember, less than 20 or so. Will I do it ever again? - don't know.
Gordon
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