>> Which remind me, to avoid the cheat possible, the award for finding a >> factor should be set somehow bigger than only the nearest 6x bits. Give >> a factor something like the full value of TFing it to 66 bit! >> IMHO the TF with a factor found should be equal to an LL; but I have >> already discussed this with George and he is afraid only factoring would >> be done if the award is that high.
> That, and you get some rather ridiculous consequences if you do that. Sorry Nathan. It is my fault you read the IMHO paragraph in a wrong way. I meant I had that point of view UNTIL I discussed it...... As George argue: Nobody would do LL if a succesful TF was rewarded the same - he is truly right. My goal is to get the succesful TF rewarded a bit higher. As it is now someone might skip the 57-65 range and only do the 66-bit part, thus missing factors and get fully rewarded for only doing half the work. >When George originally created the list of candidate exponents, he >eliminated tens of millions of composite exponents, and an infinite number >of negative exponents, non-integer exponents, imaginary exponents, and >prime exponents above the range of the program. Composite exponents was removed long before the project. Lucas must have known the exponent needed to be prime. I believe a Mersenne number has to have an exponent which is a positive integer?! The exponents above 79.300.000 are still candidates, though George has chosen to limit his program to this size and I think with very good reason. BTW, the list of found factors contains 2.500.000+ but the "top producers list" only contains 30.000- of these. GIMPS must be responsible for far more than only 30.000 factors. Any explanation for that? br tsc _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
