Will Edgington wrote: <<< The other issue is that many (most?) of the exponents with gaps also have known factors, which means Prime95 cannot be used to close those gaps since it stops on finding a factor and does not search in numeric order. This last means that it actually _creates_ gaps when it finds a factor. I don't seem to have a copy of Mfactor, so I can't check whether it has similar issues. >>>
It does not - while it does have an internal flag that, if enabled at compile time, causes it to exit as soon as a factor is found without doing the remaining passes, that flag is always disabled by default, and the TF output also reminds the user just which passes were done. (I.e. if at some point I'd set the flag for my build tests and forgot to unset it, I'd quickly be reminded of that the next time I did a factoring run that turned up a factor.) In the near future I expect to get rid of that flag entirely and instead modify the factoring-pass loop structure so it could truncate the bit depth of factoring were a factor found, but would still make sure to do all 16 factoring passes to that bit depth. That seems the cleanest solution to me which still allows some kind of early-exit. Also, perhaps you misunderstood me w.r.to M( 27471827 ) - when I said tested that number for factors up to 2^64, I meant from scratch up to 2^64 - I didn't start at the previous upper bound listed in your tables. -Ernst _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
