It is official - not prime. Both Guillermo's Mlucas run and my prime95 run return a matching non-zero residue.
We will never know what caused prime95 to generate a false positive, I am studying the code for ways in which a memory corruption could cause this. Something good will come from this sorry ending.
I am confidant this incident will have little negative impact on GIMPS. While the episode was probably an unhappy roller-coaster ride for one individual, the false positive problem is far less damaging to GIMPS than the version 17 shift bug disaster.
This incident illustrates why most other distributed projects keep any client
finds secret (even from the discoverer) until verified. If we had a similar policy
this could have been swept under the rug and no one would ever have known.
I kind of like our policy though. It lets everyone in on the ups and downs of
the project.
Thanks to Guillermo and Ernst for dedicating time to the verification run.
Best regards, George
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