RE: Mersenne: Mp and E-Cash
Unless George/Scott set some legal mumbo jumbo that ties into use of the program/source/services, they're simply not "entitled" to any prize money. I'm forced to agree with Aaron, aparently at gunpoint :-) (and I said this a while ago, BTW). Even if they (George and Scott) did this, then there would still be MacLucasUNIX, or everything else in the mers package, as well as Ernst's program, and good ol' lucas.c. Any of these could be used. We've really got to put our feet back on the ground here. If we did put a license change on all of George's program derivitives, we would still have to get Will and Ernst to change their copyrights, and Richard Crandall. In fact, is the DWT patented? If so, Richard Crandall could claim the $100,000 for himself since I think that the programs that have a prayer of finding the Deca-mega prime would use his algorithm. If someone read on George's page "running this software means that you lose most of the prize money." They could do one of 3 things: (1) Say "Oky-doky" and download/run George's program (2) Say "Well, (sensored) you" and continue surfing (3) Say "Where can I get another program?" and find the others I would imagine that the way they dole out the prize money is because use of their software implies agreement with certain terms, i.e. that you agree with the prize money disbursement outline. I didn't find anything specific, but then I didn't try and join them. I either missed it, they just "fudged" over it and hope that no one notices, or the RSA announcment covers this somehow. And again, the first deca-mega-digit prime may not be a Mersenne anyway...who can say? :-) Yah, it could be proth, or something. -Lucas _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Mp and E-Cash
At 12:44 AM 7/25/99 -0600, Aaron Blosser wrote: Neither GIMPS nor Primenet have *any* legal claim for any prize for any discovery made using Prime95/NTPrime/mprime, or any code modified and compiled that was based on George's code. Let's face it, there is nothing stipulated in the use of any of those programs, or the use of Primenet as a coordinator, that implies in any way shape or form that they would legally be entitled to any prize money at all. Yeah, but. At 05:32 PM 7/17/99 -0400, George Woltman wrote: I'm soliciting everyone's opinion before making a decision. [] a policy needs to be in place before version 19 is released. Until then, none of us will be looking in the decamega range. George is considering the creation of a non-profit corporation for the purpose of dividing the prize money, so the legal issues would be addressed. George asked for opinions on how to *distribute* the money. There's a few more worms in this can. I'm thinking specifically of Ernst, but it could be somebody else. Suppose the lucky program uses PrimeNet (and George's database), but it was not George's program? What a quagmire! One interesting point of Aaron's: or any code modified and compiled that was based on George's code. George's Merced code should render that code obsolete. --Luke _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Mp and E-Cash
[Not in reply to any specific message - no names, no pack drill] Hey, guys, surely we don't want a war over this? Here are a few relevant points: 1. GIMPS/PrimeNet as a whole constitutes a "team" in so far as we (usually) co-operate loosely with each other in order not to waste time and effort needlessly replicating each other's work. 2. However, it is certainly the case that (a) at present, the first LL test is run by a single individual or team operating their computer system(s) independently of GIMPS/PrimeNet, and (b) at present, the only thing which participants to GIMPS/PrimeNet have agreed is that they will be listed along with George Scott as co- discoverers in the event that a Mersenne prime is discovered. Run this through the courts if you must (assuming you have endless time money to waste) but I think most juries would conclude that the prize money should be awarded to the individual discoverer, in the remote chance that any was left after the lawyers had taken their slice. My guess is that making participation to GIMPS/PrimeNet conditional on agreeing to share the prize would be A Big Turn-Off. Though I'm equally sure that the vast majority of participants would indeed share out any award in some more or less sensible way, even in the absence of "guidelines". I certainly agree that some of the "shares" suggested should exist, but perhaps we need to fund them in a different way. (I've already pledged $500 towards a prize fund for discovery of any Mersenne prime which _doesn't_ qualify for the EFF award). As for some of the other points mentioned: Searching for Proth primes is less efficient than searching for Mersenne primes, this is likely to remain the case unless/until someone comes up with a "free" way of executing the remaindering operation modulo k*2^n+1. Also, since there are two parameters to play with, it's going to be harder to coordinate. The positive sides are that there is almost certain to be a 10 million digit Proth prime smaller than the smallest 10 million digit Mersenne prime, and that there are some values of k which seem to yield higher densities of primes than Mersennes (though, equally, there are other values of k for which it is proved that no primes exist). The other LL testing programs available are a lot less efficient than Prime95 and its derivatives. This may change, in time, but it really is dependent on someone with the time and expertise putting in a lot of effort. If anyone really wants to start testing 10 million digit Mersenne numbers now, I would at least urge them to obtain exponents from George, in order to prevent unneccessary duplication of effort. [If George can't be bothered, I'll volunteer to do this task!] Some commercial or adacemic research organization may well claim the EFF prize. In fact, I think this is quite likely for the $100K prize, and almost certain for the bigger prizes. The likes of Sandia already have quite sufficient "clout" to make our effort pale into insignificance, if they put their mind to it. Also, it may have escaped your notice, but IBM (who _still_ have good labs lots of working capital) recently took over Sequent (a specialist in multi- processor systems). What would be a better demonstration of the power of this particular merger than a system powerful enough to test enough 10 million digit Mersenne numbers rapidly enough to win the prize, even though such a system would certainly cost more than $100,000 to build? There is one other relevant point, which comes back to the value of encouraging co-operation. At present we find approx. 1% of the LL test results submitted are incorrect. Assuming that these are due to random errors, the proportion of incorrect results will increase with run length. By the time we get to exponents in the 10 million digit range (with run times of the order of a year) the error rate may well exceed 10%. To avoid wastage of too much time, it will be valuable to do something like issuing each exponent to two users and having automatic cross-check points during the run (instead of just at the end). Essentially this is just a refinement of double-checking in tandem with first tests, but, if we adopt this, we will surely have co-discoverers (in addition to George and Scott)? If we choose to do this, we will _have_ to get users to accept a condition forcing them to share the prize between them. In which case I don't see that it matters much whether the two users whose computer systems did the calculations split 50:50, or whether it's split 40:40:10:10 with the smaller shares going to George Scott. But I think that trying to make the smaller shares any bigger than that would tend to cause problems. Sorry if the above seems rambling inconclusive. It _is_ a difficult problem, and I personally have difficulty in coming to any definite opinion, except that the EFF prize certainly isn't worth destroying the cooperative nature of
Mersenne: Changes at mersenne.org
Hi all, You may have noticed that the web pages at mersenne.org haven't been updated recently. The reason is I've "lost" FTP access to update the pages. So, after several years at lushen.com, I'll be moving the web pages to entropia.com in the coming weeks. Be prepared for a few glitches as domain name servers are updated around the world. Many thanks to Marc Honey and lushen.com for hosting the site the past years and of course to Scott Kurowski for hosting it in the future. Regards, George _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread
Hello, everyone. Wow, there was a lot in the last digest that I thought
needed commenting on. This prize thread is _almost_ getting as bad, in my
opinion, as the other, recent, evil thread which I shall not name. I am, of
course, replying to many different people in this message.
P.S. Are archives available past February 1998?
The archives, from what I've personally seen, seem to be "broken", and I
don't think anyone has been running archives for the list since then. This is
Ptoo Bad for me, because I was depending on the archives to keep my post
about my 3 Mersenne prime conjectures (#1: That there's a prime around the 4M
range that we're missing. #2: That the discovered M38, which all we knew
about was that it was in the 6M range, was actually around 6.9M, which I was
correct about, and #3: A conjecture about the decamegaprime.), but I guess
I'll rely on everyone's memories and perhaps (!) their own personal archives.
I would keep my own, but the digests usually run over 20K, and AOL doesn't
like to store mails of that size in the regular fashion.
What's wrong with having a panel (possibly consisting of previous
Mersenne prime discoverers) to evaluate any contenders for this
judge how much, if any, of the fund should be awarded for each
improvement?
Sensible idea. The panel could come up with their own set of rules.
I'm not sure I'd want to be on such a panel unless my vote was
anonymous ("Sorry, Heloisa, but I think your idea was worth only").
I agree wholly with the other person who said that the prize is the
discoverer's and the discoverer's alone. GIMPS can't have a panel nor any
other thing to divy up the money. We can _suggest_ things that the winner
_might_ want to do with the money, but we can't _order_ her/him to do a
single thing.
Landon Noll is disqualified.
Why?
But they all won't get tested, not for another 20+ years. After the
10Mdigit prime, there will be the 100Mdigit prime, then the giga-digit
prime. GIMPS has been lauded for conducting an orderly search, even
more so for double checking. Jumping ahead, the search space will once
again become horribly fragmented -- a giant step backwards into the Cray
era.
Orderly checking is a MUST.
I don't know if that's fair or not, I won't get into that. But the
discoverer of a prime found using GIMPS and/or Primenet would receive all
the money him/herself and then it's up to him/her what to do with it;
whether sharing some with George/Scott is something they would do is
entirely up to them.
Correct.
Unless George/Scott set some legal mumbo jumbo that ties into use of the
program/source/services, they're simply not "entitled" to any prize money.
Avoiding legal mumbo jumbo is an equal must.
And it was mentioned before...if George and/or Scott setup such a legal
contract regarding software usage, there probably would be people writing
their own software, hoping to get the big cash all to themselves. And the
whole effort of coordinating who works on what exponents could get messy if
Scott says that using his Primenet database to check out/in numbers means
you agree to share prize money with him. People will start grabbing their
own numbers or setting up competing databases of their own or who knows
what.
This is my fear. Right now, GIMPS is the only major concerted effort to find
Mersenne Primes, and we ought to keep it that way. This has led to orderly
searching, and not a mad free-for-all. The prize money should (and must!) go
entirely to the discoverer, because any attempts to do otherwise will most
likely lead to this sort of dire fragmentation.
And again, the first deca-mega-digit prime may not be a Mersenne
anyway...who can say? :-)
It could be a Fermat prime! *chortle*
If that's the case, it is up to that "group" to decide, in some legally
binding way, how prize money is disbursed. I suppose it's too late to worry
about such things now, since the $50K prize-winner has been found, but it's
something to think about, if we choose to go down that perilous road,
sometime before the $100K winner becomes imminent.
As such, I think the EFF would have to award the money solely to the
individual since no prior stipulations existed between him and George/Scott
on how the money would be split.
And, as I've said, stipulations would not be a good thing.
I agree also...like I mentioned above, setting up legalities will only
muddle the entire issue and give rise to competing databases and programs.
Definitely.
Just my $0.02 worth (of course anyone who disagrees with me will be shot!)
I liked another thing I once saw. You know those little tags that say "These
opinions are not those of the So-And-So Corporation"? Peter Gutmann has the
following tag on his web page:
Disclaimer
Any opinions expressed on this page are not in fact mine but were forced on
me at gunpoint by the University of Auckland.
If someone read on George's page "running this software means that you
lose most
RE: Mersenne: Mp and E-Cash
Ken Kriesel writes: I think Duncan Booth's name at least ought to be considered when discussing the $ split. He wrote the first version of primenet server and client; Scott Kurowski continued from the starting point that Duncan provided. I suspect that Scott has considerably more total effort invested, but part of that is as a business venture. OK. Then what about John Sweeney? Jason Kline? Crandall Fagin? How about the people that wrote factoring code? As others have noted, this is a big can of worms that's just complicating things without really adding anything to the effort itself. Will _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
RE: Mersenne: Mp and E-Cash
Lucas Wiman writes: I'm forced to agree with Aaron, aparently at gunpoint :-) (and I said this a while ago, BTW). Even if they (George and Scott) did this, then there would still be MacLucasUNIX, or everything else in the mers package, as well as Ernst's program, and good ol' lucas.c. MacLucasUNIX, mersenne1, etc., of the mers package can indeed be used to find such large Mersenne primes, right now, and someone out there is probably already doing it. But, if they are, they haven't told me and they are thus looking at exponents for which I have known factors; noone but me - and I mean noone, not even George - has all of my data for these large exponents. Any of these could be used. We've really got to put our feet back on the ground here. If we did put a license change on all of George's program derivitives, we would still have to get Will and Ernst to change their copyrights, and Richard Crandall. It's actually worse than this. I never intended to copyright any of the code I distribute, in part because some of it is already covered by copyright and/or patent for commercial purposes. Is trying to claim the EFF prize a commercial purpose? Don't ask me; I'm not a lawyer. Will _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread
At 03:22 PM 7/25/99 -0400, you wrote: This is my fear. Right now, GIMPS is the only major concerted effort to find Mersenne Primes, and we ought to keep it that way. This has led to orderly searching, and not a mad free-for-all. The prize money should (and must!) go entirely to the discoverer, because any attempts to do otherwise will most likely lead to this sort of dire fragmentation. While I agree with this, if the effort does NOT fragment and jump ahead to potential 10MM-digits, someone else is likely to find and claim that $100K with a Proth prime, since checking those will take far less time than a Mersenne test of the same order. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread
At 04:40 PM 7/25/99 -0400, Jeff Woods wrote: While I agree with this, if the effort does NOT fragment and jump ahead to potential 10MM-digits, someone else is likely to find and claim that $100K with a Proth prime, since checking those will take far less time than a Mersenne test of the same order. Is that true? I thought that a LL test of a Mersenne was faster. ++ | Jud McCranie | || | 127*2^96744+1 is prime! (29,125 digits, Oct 20, 1998) | ++ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Proth Vs. Mersenne (Grudge match of the century)
Is that true? I thought that a LL test of a Mersenne was faster. Everything I've ever heard says that LL tests are faster than Proth, and in fact the quickest test for primality versus other types of numbers. Hm. S.T.L. _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread
At present we find approx. 1% of the LL test results submitted are incorrect. That figure seems a tad high. After double-checking, there would be a 0.01% chance that BOTH tests had failed, which seems very high to me. Well, the likelyhood that a failure occurs may be 1%, but the likelyhood that a double check will not catch it is much lower. This is do to the fact that (barring bugs), the likelyhood that the numbers produce the same 64-bit residue is very, very low. Probably somewhere between 2^-64 and 2^-128. -Lucas _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Proth's Test (was: Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread)
Proth's Test for n = k*2^m+1 says that there exists a such that a^(n-1)/2 + 1 is divisible by n. The other factor in evaluating this is that, in Proth's Test, a has got to be an odd prime - if you pick the wrong prime, you're wasting time, though fortunately this can usually be detected very early. That bit is virtually free of charge. Any quadratic non-residue will do just fine. If a^(n-1)/2 isn't -1, then the number isn't prime (by Euler's quadratic residue criterion). The algorithm does take longer, sure, but it's the targetability that makes the difference. If the first 10^7+ digit prime has 20 million digits, it'll be taking longer to test each one than a 10 million digit Proth candidate. I'm playing devil's advocate here. If prize money is anybody's motivation, we'd all be better off selling our PC's and buying lottery tickets, or hitting the stock market. Chris _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Proth's Test (was: Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread)
At 07:13 PM 7/25/99 -0400, Chris Nash wrote: That bit is virtually free of charge. Any quadratic non-residue will do just fine. But you don't easily know if a number is a QNR, do you? +--+ | Jud "program first and think later" McCranie | +--+ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Proth's Test (was: Re: Mersenne: Evil, evil prize thread)
That bit is virtually free of charge. Any quadratic non-residue will do just fine. But you don't easily know if a number is a QNR, do you? Suppose the number you're testing is N. If we assume N is prime, then quadratic reciprocity could be used to determine whether your base a is a QNR. So pick your base a, do your test, which proves QNR and hence primality (Proth's theorem basically states the Euler criterion for a QNR is necessary *and* sufficient to prove primality). If you don't get what you expect from the quadratic residue symbol, then it's composite. (Look up 'Kronecker symbol' - basically, an excuse to use quadratic reciprocity whether or not you know N is prime). The LL test implicitly does the same for Mersenne tests - they only make sense if 3 is a QNR. The start value S_0=4 is really (2+sqrt(3))+(2-sqrt(3))... square that, and you'll see where the -2 comes from :) S_n=(2+sqrt(3))^(2^n) + (2-sqrt(3))^(2^n) If the test proves compositeness, it doesn't matter whether 3 was *really* a QNR or not, you've proved what you wanted either way. The final bit of glue is that all Mersennes of odd exponent1 are equal to 7 mod 12, and so 3 is indeed a QNR for the prime ones. Chris _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
