I have been personally interested in primes for many years and have recently joined GIMPS (4 years ago) and as I review the various statistics and reports I find it more interesting all the time.
There are a few points that I can't seem to figure out or understand. I hope these aren't stupid questions. 1. On the Status page: http://www.mersenne.org/status.htm the stats table has ranges of numbers. Does anyone know why the ranges are what they are? They aren't powers of 2 or of 10 but they seem to be non-arbitrary. The first rew (other than the very first) are about 150,000 numbers, the next groups almost 300,000 and the last few 550,000. 2. The upper limit is 79,300,000. Again a curious number. Why this number? 2 to the 26th would be about 67,000,000. 3. Until the last status update there was 1 "status unknown" number between 15,300,000 and 17,850,000. I thought I could look in the "Assigned" and "Cleared" reports on the http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml page of hourly stats to find the one missing number. I found 15,546,877 with a "D*" in the second column from which I understand the "D" means double checking and the "*" means the preliminary factoring phase of LL. While several lower exponents had a blank (LL test) in that column, this was the lowest exponent with a "*". However, the most recent GIMPS stats page from today shows there are now NO "status unknown" numbers in that range while 15,546,877 is still not cleared. Which number was it or more importantly how could I have determined this? Of course, this isn't something I NEED to know; I just like to understand these things. Thanks Wayne _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
