Re: Mersenne: Poaching and related issues...
Nathan Russell wrote: Okay, to start with, GIMPS lost the very first prime we ever found to a member of another project who beat George to finding the exponent by a matter of hours. This is simply the way math and other fields of research work. Darwin's theory of evolution was very nearly duplicated by another researcher working independently. So were some of Edison's improvements on the telegraph. But with regard to Primenet poaching, there is a crucial difference from each of the three cases you cite. Within Primenet, just as within many other distributed computational projects, there is a reserving/assigning system for the purpose of minimizing unnecessary duplication or overlap of work. The cases of conflict you cite had no such method for avoiding duplication/overlap. Early GIMPS and the other project (Slowinski/Cray) had no common agreement or method for avoiding duplication. Darwin and the other guy (Wallace) had made no arrangement to work on separate theories. Edison was in frank competition with other inventors; he wouldn't have even tried to cooperate for nonduplication, I think. However, Primenet cannot _enforce_ its nonduplication/nonoverlap policy. Primenet can control exclusiveness of its assignments (who shall perform this work unit), but the exclusiveness of its reservations (only one participant shall perform this work unit while assigned) depends on voluntary cooperation by participants. Poaching, in the Primenet context, is noncooperation with the voluntary, cooperative reservation rules. If a 'poacher' beat me to a prime I'd be very upset. That's one reason why some of us want to prevent poaching if possible. It's not likely to happen to me, because I run an Athlon XP 2000+ Yes, slow systems are more likely to get poached. So users with slow systems may be more motivated to try to prevent poaching than users with fast systems. That doesn't mean poaching is right, it does mean you're making yourself something of a tempting target. Increasing the difficulty for a poacher to _find_ a tempting target would mean other participants could be less concerned about making themselves into such a target, and just concentrate on doing the work they considered most suitable within the rules. Richard Woods _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1036
Gordon Spence wrote: Of course, as this is a *public* volunteer project, there are a lot of us, who have been in the project for a long-time (6+ years) ... which got me wondering when I started, which was: Sun, 08 Dec 1996 (at least that's when I requested my first range) 6 years, 48 days as of today. who regularly look through these for no other reason than we *want* to. Okay, I *want* to, too. But suppose there's a correlation between ability to browse _other_ people's assignment status info (you can always see your own complete assignment info), and ability to select poaching targets on the basis of other people's assignment status info? It seems worth discussing possible ideas for reducing the second even if it means reducing the first, not necessarily by the same proportion. That would deny target-selecting information to would-be poachers, right? No. If I was setting out to poach numbers - which in itself is a moot point. You don't *own* an exponent, they are after all simply numbers. I think there's a fairly well-established consensus that in the context of GIMPS/Primenet, to poach means to run a (L-L, usually) test while it is assigned by Primenet to a different GIMPS participant or something similar. There's another consensus that Primenet assignments mean something like a reservation as is used in other cooperative computational projects to avoid duplicated effort. If I was setting out to poach numbers, then I would simply setup a few 3.06 Ghz P4's and just start at the bottom of the list (smallest exponents) and let rip. So, unlike many other poachers who've declared themselves and their motives on this list or in the GIMPS Forum, you wouldn't care whether any of those exponents were, say, only 2 days from completion by the Primenet assignee? Is that correct? You wouldn't take the trouble to distinguish between an assignment that has an estimated 2 days to completion and one that had 200 days to completion? Complete an exponent every day or so. So some of them might be completed before me, so what, we then have a triple check. If someone wants to do it, you won't stop them. My proposal was not aimed at stopping that sort of blind poaching. (And I disclaimed that it would stop ALL of any type of poaching.) You are missing the point about it being useful to have triple checks. No, I'm not. I readily agree that triplechecks have some value. Perhaps you and I differ as to how that value ranks relative to values of some other things, like the value of a poach-free Primenet assignment? Make the current assignments report password-protected, then substitute a new public assignments report that omits the above four items. Do the system administrators currently need the eyes and attention of others to detect stragglers _about whom action needs to be taken_? If not, then why provide this information to poachers? If so, just give some other trusted individuals the password for the full assignments report. Are you putting yourself forward as one of the trusted individuals? Trusted not to poach (as is meant in this context) -- yes, just as would thousands of other GIMPSers be, I imagine. But I don't have time to devote to the sort of report monitoring or usage that some others do, so I wouldn't request report access or volunteer to monitor in the first place. Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime? As long as you could be trusted by system administrators not to poach, sure. Is there any particularly _special_ relationship between being a Mersenne prime discoverer and being trusted not to poach? Unless there is some such special relationship, I imagine that thousands of non-discoverers could also be trusted not to poach. Richard Woods _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Communication between GIMPS Forum and Mersenne mailinglist (was: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof)
If this is happening big time then the list is finished, and is basically an announcement-only list. I'm sure many people like the fact that mailing list messages come to them, rather than them having to make time to go and browse a website and deduce the updates from remembering when they last visited. The correct way to do discussion lists has never really been mail or web, but news (NNTP). This way everything stays under its own thread, and no-one has to download the whole page of forum discussions to get the one extra message at the bottom. An idea, but I suspect no-one would move. Also, when the forum was first announced, it was never actually decided what would happen with regard to copyright on the messages. The discussion trailed off with some people saying that they wouldn't post to a forum which claimed copyright, but no-one ever stated that the forum wouldn't do just that. Perhaps there can be some belated clarification on this? Also, what do we do about archiving material (simple for a list)? If the forum goes down is that the end of all the postings? Richard Woods wrote: What should/can be done to ensure that those who can't/don't read the Forum are alerted to, and can contribute to, important topics discussd on the GIMPS Forum and are informed of important announcements/decisions posted on the Forum? [Sent this earlier but it didn't get through... Sending again] -- === Gareth Randall === -- === Gareth Randall === _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Communication between GIMPS Forum and Mersenne mailing list (was: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof)
On Sat, Jan 25, 2003 at 12:38:35AM -0500, Michael Vang wrote: Well, to be honest, not much more can be done... As it is now, we have several mechanisms in place to enable people with dialup access the ability to log on and get done right quick... 1) There are no heavy graphics usage... (If I were paying for access I'd have graphics turned off anyways!) 2) Everything is GZIP compressed... 3) You can have email notifications of new posts... Still, you can't do what you can do with e-mail or a newsgroup, namely: a) Log on, download all new posts, log off. b) Sit logged off, take your time to read all new e-mail (in a form _you_ choose -- if you don't like the forum interface, you can't change it, but you're free to select whatever mail-/newsreader you want). No delays to read a new message, proper text editing functions if you want it, etc.. c) Log on, upload your answers, log off. In short, the very concept of a web forum (where you have to do everything via the web, rather than using a dedicated application for it) just isn't that appealing to most people who have used e-mail or news for a while. The fact that most forums are extremely poorly designed userfriendliness-wise (note that I'm not very familiar to the GIMPS forums, so don't take this as a critique of the GIMPS forums in particular) doesn't help, either. :-) /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Poaching and related issues...
On Sat, Jan 25, 2003 at 03:38:14AM -0500, Richard Woods wrote: The cases of conflict you cite had no such method for avoiding duplication/overlap. Early GIMPS and the other project (Slowinski/Cray) had no common agreement or method for avoiding duplication. Umm, I've not been in this project _that_ long, but at least a year or two before Primenet got integrated into the main client. At least at that time, all communication was done by e-mailing George requests for ranges (a list of free ranges was available on the GIMPS website), George solving conflicts if two people requested the same range. (All results were also handed back to George via e-mail, of course.) Are you talking even older than that? :-) /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Communication between GIMPS Forum and Mersenne mailing list
On Saturday 25 January 2003 05:38, Michael Vang wrote: Well, to be honest, not much more can be done... As it is now, we have several mechanisms in place to enable people with dialup access the ability to log on and get done right quick... What about posting (a digest of) forum messages on the list, a la SourceForge? 1) There are no heavy graphics usage... (If I were paying for access I'd have graphics turned off anyways!) 2) Everything is GZIP compressed... 3) You can have email notifications of new posts... I was stuck on dialup for a week recently and was able to keep up with the forum with just 5 minutes of reading a day... And I don't read all that fast... And it was a 33.6 connection... I find the major problem is the awkwardness of going on offline when composing contributions, especially replies. Having been an Internet user for 20 years, I think store forward rather than instant messaging. That's my problem, not yours. Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof
On Saturday 25 January 2003 02:07, John R Pierce wrote: But, no, you won't be able to complete a 10M on a P100 ;-) my slowest machine still on primenet is a p150 that has 60 days to finish 14581247, its been working on it for about 300 days now, 24/7, with nearly zero downtime. 2.22 seconds per iteration, yikes. I probably should retire this box after it completes this one, its still running v16 :D Obviously if such a change were made one would expect a period of grace to accomodate assignments already started to complete. On Saturday 25 January 2003 00:42, Nathan Russell wrote: Does this apply to 10M assignments? I don't see why not. The machine I used until earlier this month, a P3-600, couldn't do those in much under 6 months, and some machines which were sold new around 2000 are unable to do them in a year. Yes. But given that there is plenty of work left which can usefully be run on systems a lot slower than P3-600, and that the fastest PC systems currently available can run a 10M digit range LL test in about 4 weeks, I'm not sure it is sensible to be running 10M digit assignments on P3-600s any more. On Saturday 25 January 2003 00:39, Mikus Grinbergs wrote: [... snip ...] What I am saying is that having an assignment expire after a year does not get at the root of the problem. Even if an assignee could perform the work in 15 days start-to-finish, a poacher with a Cray might decide to intervene anyway. But in my experience the majority of poaching is connected with running tests on the lowest outstanding exponents irrespective of the fact they're assigned to someone else. My suggestion is that in order to receive credit for their work, everybody MUST register what they are doing. Sure. But does this address the problem? And the registration process must refuse to give out duplicate assignments. I wasn't aware that it did. But what is the objection to having both LL test and double check for a particular exponent assigned simultaneously? If we're done looking for factors, we need the results of both runs eventually. BTW what about another problem I have come across on several occasions, namely reverse poaching? This is when I have properly got an assignment which someone else has let expire, but the original assignee reports a result whilst I'm working on it? Regards Brian Beesley _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Poaching and related issues...
Increasing the difficulty for a poacher to _find_ a tempting target would mean other participants could be less concerned about making themselves into such a target, and just concentrate on doing the work they considered most suitable within the rules. If the rules you are referring to include the possible new guidelines George proposes (which in a nut shell goes something like this -- snips taken from a couple of posts on the forum by George) Consensus seems to be building around a sliding scale. It's 2 to 3 months for the smallest double-checks and first-time tests (to avoid holding up milestones), 6 months for recycled exponents, 12 months for an exponent at the leading edge. 2+ years for a 33M exponent. Give or take. A leading edge first time test today is unlikely to hold up a milestone for maybe 2 years. I'm not advocating yanking a reservation just because you've had it one year. I think we are proposing reassignment if you take more than a year and some other criteria is met such as: a) You aren't making significant progress. b) You are holding up a milestone. c) Require the user to fill out a web form saying I'm still working on it Then in fact, those guidelines are more stringent than ANY poaching methodology I've seen to date (including Malfoy's) other than some willy-nilly poacher who has no methodology at all (which I believe in most cases turn out to be a previous owner turning in the assignment from a expired owner 1 or 2 assignments ago). So in order to keep within these guidelines suitable types of work for a given machine would just so happen to avoid much of any chance of getting poached TODAY. Which brings to mind another part of Georges proposal which I don't see a easy *snip* for. The basic jest is that the new server would assign work to clients based upon this ideology, in other words the new server would be careful not to assigned a trailing edge exponent to historically slow computer. I whole heartily believe the best way to eliminate poaching is to minimize the reasons there are poachers to begin with rather than trying to make it more difficult to do. Even masking the exponents has a big loop hole in that it would take years to become effective even if implemented today. All that has to be done is to save a copy of status.txt today and you know a very very big chunk of the exponents that will fall in the trailing edge of the assignment list of many many years. After that it's a trivial matter of elimination to deduce which is which when masked. Shane _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof
On Wednesday 22 January 2003 22:50, Richard Woods wrote: Here's what I've just posted in the GIMPS Forum. - - - _IF_ PrimeNet has automatic time limits on assignments, ordinarily requiring no manual intervention to expire assignments or re-assign them, then why would any GIMPS participant, other than a system administrator or a would-be poacher, need to know someone else's: (a) current iteration, (b) days-to-go, (c) days-to-expire, or (d) last date-updated? If there's no non-poaching non-administrating user's need-to-know for those items, then just stop including them in public reports. Include them only in administrative reports and private password-requiring individual reports. That would deny target-selecting information to would-be poachers, right? Sure. So would eliminating the report altogether. I'll add my 2 cents worth to this by saying what difference does it really make how detailed the reports are??? Any report, no matter how detailed, can be used for both good AND bad, just like anything else. When they split the atom, did anybody foresee it being used to drop the bomb??? When they discovered they could transplant organs, did anybody foresee people being murdered for black-market transplants??? My point is, if somebody is going to poach exponents, whether it's sanctioned or not, how detailed the report is, doesn't make a single bit of difference. Here is a very good example, having just looked at the Assigned Exponent Report. There are two exponents below 7 million out being double-checked. If somebody wants to have everything under 7 million checked sooner than later, and they know they can test both exponents in say 5 days, they are going to do it, no matter what. It doesn't matter whether the report looks like: 6715589 D* 64 506675260.9 14.2 74.2 14-Jan-03 22:02 24-Nov-02 20:49 crown bubak 6977699 D* 64 6750207 233.7 -27.2 22.8 17-Dec-02 13:16 05-Jun-02 02:23 guizuzaguizuza OR looks like: 6715589 D* crown bubak 6977699 D* guizuzaguizuza Why?? Because the poacher knows they can do both in 5 days! It doesn't matter whether the current assignee is on iteration 1 or 6715580, or has been assigned the exponent 1 day or 350 days. The poacher is going to do the exponents anyways. Besides that, if there is more than one poacher, they're taking a chance that somebody else hasn't already poached the exponent, and they are checking it for the 5th time. Again, it doesn't matter how detailed the report is. Personally, IMHO, I like to see all the details, just to get a general idea of how things are progressing. Maybe it's because it's math, math is all about numbers, and I like numbers. (you know, the more details, the more numbers there are!) If anything was changed in the reports, I would say I would like to see the reports accurately report factoring depth, but even George's files don't do that (because of the .5 adjustment used for P-1). If a exponent says it's been tested to 2^68, how do you know it's 2^68, or whether it's 2^67, with P-1 having been done as well??? But that is so minor of a thing, it's only a glancing thought. OK... I'll shut up now... and get back to more mersenne testing... Eric Hahn _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Communication between GIMPS Forum and Mersenne mailing list (was: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof)
In no particular order... The correct way to do discussion lists has never really been mail or web, but news (NNTP). This way everything stays under its own thread, and no-one has to download the whole page of forum discussions to get the one extra message at the bottom. An idea, but I suspect no-one would move. I agree... The threaded nature of NNTP (And the forum!) is what makes it so desireable... I agree that the offline nature of NNTP is appealing as well... Also, when the forum was first announced, it was never actually decided what would happen with regard to copyright on the messages. The discussion trailed off with some people saying that they wouldn't post to a forum which claimed copyright, but no-one ever stated that the forum wouldn't do just that. Perhaps there can be some belated clarification on this? All somebody has to do is write up a legal-sounding copyright statement and I will integrate it into the forum... Our policy now is nobody owns the content... I guess that makes it public domain... Anyways, the only reason there isn't a copyright statement is because I am not a lawyer so I wouldn't know what needed to be said... I'm certain somebody out there has experience in this area... While it is easy to view this situation as a sinister plot, the truth of the matter is quite simple and benign... :) Also, what do we do about archiving material (simple for a list)? If the forum goes down is that the end of all the postings? I do a backup every two days... Recently, we lost around three days of posts due to a corrupt backup/restore cycle, but other than that fiasco the forum has been 100% reliable... Anyways, if I strip the security stuff from the database (MySQL) then I could just give the database away as a giant archive... It is on my to do list! Right now the database is around 17MB uncompressed... I've viewed the forum in myphpadmin and it is just a pile of text records... Extracting the info to be manipulated would be trivial for a MySQl or database expert... What about posting (a digest of) forum messages on the list, a la SourceForge? Show me how to do this and it will be done... We have a mail server set up as well... The forum code is fully available to look at... Just go to http://www.phpbb.com/ to see it... The forum software is easily patched with mods to add functionality... I made the mistake initially of installing a pile of modes, which made upgrading difficult, but I'm sure I could handle one or two... The only disadvantage about making the forum accessable in places other than the forum is it encourages people to just read and to not participate... The whole purpose of the forum is to increase participation and discussion... While I don't want to do away with the mailing list, I see the mailing list better suited to announcements, but that is my vision of things and not necessarily what George has in mind... If the forum stuff was posted to the mailing list, then people would reply to it here, and that would certainly complicate things, but I'm willing to do whatever is best for the project... (If the consensus was that the forum was a bad thing I would kill it instantly!) Having been an Internet user for 20 years, I think store forward rather than instant messaging. That's my problem, not yours. Hey, I'm as old school as anybody, but things change I guess... The advantages to a forum far outweigh the disadvantages... You have private messanging (Which gets used a *lot*!), threading, inline images, email notification, instant searching and blazing speed, and that is just the tip of the iceberg... I posted here last night in the mailing list and it took a *long* time for my message to appear... A lot of the discussion on the forum is near real time... When you log in you can see who else is logged in, which I find to be kinda fun... In short, the very concept of a web forum (where you have to do everything via the web, rather than using a dedicated application for it) just isn't that appealing to most people who have used e-mail or news for a while. The fact that most forums are extremely poorly designed userfriendliness-wise (note that I'm not very familiar to the GIMPS forums, so don't take this as a critique of the GIMPS forums in particular) doesn't help, either. :-) As I mentioned before, I'm an old school type guy myself, but you have to understand that our target audience is not us, but the newer generation on kids, to whom NNTP and email are foreign concepts... Not to get sidetracked, but to be utterly honest, the reason TPR has been so successful is because we have geared our entire structure to cater to the 15-35 year old age group... I can't tell you how many times I have had to modify my approach away from what I consider to be optimal to cater to the members of the team, but in the end, that is what keeps participants participating... Note that we have close to 7000 years of work in LL and over 1000 years in factoring... 90%+ of that is *new
Re: Mersenne: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof
I participate in other distributed_computing projects as well. Though I personally could care less about the statistics of any project, I notice that there is an entire subculture focused on tracking one's own work vs. that of the other participants. My proposal is simple -- If someone poaches (by that I mean: turns in work that was __not__ assigned by Primenet nor an *authorized* 'team leader' [e.g., George]), then IGNORE that submitted work (except that the submitted value could be used as a NOT_FOR_CREDIT triple-check value). By DENYING credit for poaching, the individual involved will __not__ get the satisfaction of others seeing *his* accomplishment -- not even the satisfaction of seeing *his* work fulfill any 'milestone'. [I have a sneaking suspicion that the world would not end if a GIMPS 'milestone' had to be slipped (not even if it had to be slipped by MONTHS !!) ] On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 07:51:10 + Brian J. Beesley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Saturday 25 January 2003 00:39, Mikus Grinbergs wrote: [... snip ...] My suggestion is that in order to receive credit for their work, everybody MUST register what they are doing. Sure. But does this address the problem? If the poacher's unregistered work NEVER shows up in any report, that makes poaching a selfless activity -- no one except the poacher himself will ever see that he did the work. And the registration process must refuse to give out duplicate assignments. I wasn't aware that it did. But what is the objection to having both LL test and double check for a particular exponent assigned simultaneously? If we're done looking for factors, we need the results of both runs eventually. In my mind an 'LL test' and a 'double check' are two separate assignments. The intent of what I wrote was to __not__ allow a poacher to claim I was told to run this exponent. If the registration process does a good job of for the same exponent not handing out two 'LL tests' simultaneously, or two 'double checks', or two 'whatevers', then such a statement by a poacher would be a lie. BTW what about another problem I have come across on several occasions, namely reverse poaching? This is when I have properly got an assignment which someone else has let expire, but the original assignee reports a result whilst I'm working on it? Tough for the original assignee who let that assignment expire. Since the assignment is no longer registered to him, he would be treated as a poacher, and would not receive any credit for his result. I would prefer that before _any_ assignment is properly taken away from the previous registrant, that an e-mail be sent to that registrant offering him the opportunity to log in somewhere and affirm that he is still working on it. If he fails to do so in say 15 days, *then* de-register that assignment. [I think the worst part about poaching is that the person who was officially given the assignment DOES NOT KNOW that somebody else is duplicating (and will complete earlier) that SAME work. To my mind, a poacher is being intentionally disrespectful of the person who __did__ use the proper registration procedure.] mikus (not looking at the GIMPS forums) _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Poaching and related issues...
At 09:50 AM 1/25/03 -0600, Shane Sanford wrote: Increasing the difficulty for a poacher to _find_ a tempting target would mean other participants could be less concerned about making themselves into such a target, and just concentrate on doing the work they considered most suitable within the rules. If the rules you are referring to include the possible new guidelines George proposes (which in a nut shell goes something like this -- snips taken from a couple of posts on the forum by George) Consensus seems to be building around a sliding scale. It's 2 to 3 months for the smallest double-checks and first-time tests (to avoid holding up milestones), 6 months for recycled exponents, 12 months for an exponent at the leading edge. 2+ years for a 33M exponent. Give or take. A leading edge first time test today is unlikely to hold up a milestone for maybe 2 years. I'm not advocating yanking a reservation just because you've had it one year. I think we are proposing reassignment if you take more than a year and some other criteria is met such as: a) You aren't making significant progress. b) You are holding up a milestone. c) Require the user to fill out a web form saying I'm still working on it Even these guidelines though... are NOT going to stop any poacher intent on doing such, to complete a small exponent so a milestone can be reached... OR for any other reason... I whole heartily believe the best way to eliminate poaching is to minimize the reasons there are poachers to begin with rather than trying to make it more difficult to do. Even masking the exponents has a big loop hole in that it would take years to become effective even if implemented today. All that has to be done is to save a copy of status.txt today and you know a very very big chunk of the exponents that will fall in the trailing edge of the assignment list of many many years. After that it's a trivial matter of elimination to deduce which is which when masked. IMHO, NO system whatsoever, will be able to prevent a poacher intent on doing such. ANY system that is used, is going to have a flaw or loophole of some kind. We could eliminate the status reports completely, and only assign exponents blindly, but even that won't work. The only thing it would do is make a whole lot more work for some individual, which would most likely be George. Even this possible new system for the server assignments is flawed. Let's say a maximum time limit is set and reached. The exponent is expired and is re-assigned. How do we know that exponent won't be expired time and time again??? The answer is, that we don't, and any poacher intent on doing such, knows that too, and is going to poach the exponent... NO IFS, ANDS or BUTS... ANY system... and I mean ANY system is not going to prevent poaching from happening. Did prohibition stop the sell and consumption of alcohol??? It reminds me of the saying When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns! Any person determined to poach, is going to find a way to do such, no matter what system is used to prevent it! The best solution is probably strong discouragement of the practice of poaching. eminding EVERYBODY that not only is poaching NOT sanctioned, but that the time spent poaching is wasted, and could have been used to further the project otherwise. Also note that the poacher themselves are risking being poached themselves, and that even more time is wasted as the exponent is tested for the 5th time, when just a 2nd test would have been sufficient. Using the example from my previous post, 2 exponents taking 5 days to test, and being tested 5 times instead of 2, is wasting 15 days worth of times that could have been used to complete 6 additional trailing-edge tests, or maybe 2 additional leading-edge tests. Maybe not so significant is the grand scheme of the project overall, but maybe as far as reaching certain milestones, it is. Sort of makes you wonder, just what milestone the project would be on, if NO POACHING was occurring. Maybe all exponents under 8 million could have been tested by now, instead of just under 7 million. OK... I'll shut up again... and go back to my own work... (some of which I might add is FAR OUTSIDE of Primenet ranges, but HAS STILL BEEN POACHED on occassion!)... Eric _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1037
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 03:32:43 -0500 From: Richard Woods [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1036 Gordon Spence wrote: Of course, as this is a *public* volunteer project, there are a lot of us, who have been in the project for a long-time (6+ years) [snip] No. If I was setting out to poach numbers - which in itself is a moot point. You don't *own* an exponent, they are after all simply numbers. I think there's a fairly well-established consensus that in the context of GIMPS/Primenet, to poach means to run a (L-L, usually) test while it is assigned by Primenet to a different GIMPS participant or something similar. There's another consensus that Primenet assignments mean something like a reservation as is used in other cooperative computational projects to avoid duplicated effort. I think we all agree on how it's supposed to work and indeed does work for 99.+% of the exponents. It was also correctly pointed out a while ago when this first cropped out (hi Aaron) about three years ago, that they are after all *just numbers*. Nobody owns them and anyone in the world can work on whatever they want without anyone's permission. Don't lose sight of that fact. If I was setting out to poach numbers, then I would simply setup a few 3.06 Ghz P4's and just start at the bottom of the list (smallest exponents) and let rip. So, unlike many other poachers who've declared themselves and their motives on this list or in the GIMPS Forum, you wouldn't care whether any of those exponents were, say, only 2 days from completion by the Primenet assignee? Is that correct? You wouldn't take the trouble to distinguish between an assignment that has an estimated 2 days to completion and one that had 200 days to completion? If anyone wanted to systematically poach, then that is a very simple approach. Most checks would be double-checks, all the rest - in reality very few - would be triple-checks. Anything that adds to the sum total knowledge is *always* a gain to the world of science, even if it is a loss to an individual somewhere. Indeed with some simple scripting it would be fairly easy to automate. [snip] Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime? As long as you could be trusted by system administrators not to poach, sure. Is there any particularly _special_ relationship between being a Mersenne prime discoverer and being trusted not to poach? Unless there is some such special relationship, I imagine that thousands of non-discoverers could also be trusted not to poach. Well in actual fact, there *is* now that you come to mention it. As a Mersenne Prime discoverer I am given immediate notification of any new MP immediately it is reported, ie *before* it is verified. We are trusted to keep it quiet.because when we discovered ours we proved that we were capable of _discretion_
Re: Mersenne: Communication between GIMPS Forum and Mersenne mailing list (was: Poaching -- Discouragement thereof)
Mikus Grinbergs wrote: several good ideas mikus (not looking at the GIMPS forums) Mikus is just one of the contributors to the Mersenne list discussion who has not only independently reached some of the same conclusions posted slightly earlier on the GIMPS Forum, but also come up with new wrinkles that I don't recall having seen there. This is not unexpected; it makes sense that there would be both parallels and differences between two separate discussions that had been seeded with the same proposal. But consider the potential loss of ideas, as well as needless duplication of effort, because some readers of each medium will not see the discussion in the other medium. The point I wish to make is that this sort of thing will continue to happen as long as GIMPS has significant discussions in independent media without extensive (and probably not practical) cross-communication. Richard Woods _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Re: Mersenne: Re: Mersenne Digest V1 #1037
Gordon Spence wrote: [snip] I think there's a fairly well-established consensus that in the context of GIMPS/Primenet, to poach means to run a (L-L, usually) test while it is assigned by Primenet to a different GIMPS participant or something similar. There's another consensus that Primenet assignments mean something like a reservation as is used in other cooperative computational projects to avoid duplicated effort. I think we all agree on how it's supposed to work So you agree that there should be no poaching of Primenet assignments -- right? Or by it, were you not including Primenet? [snip] they are after all *just numbers*. Nobody owns them and So by they and them you _do_ mean just the numbers, without any consideration of GIMPS or Primenet - correct? anyone in the world can work on whatever they want Well, sure. But that's irrelevant to my proposal. My proposal concerned the GIMPS/Primenet system, not the whole world. without anyone's permission. Isn't there something in the current GIMPS/Primenet software along the lines of if you use our software, you agree to abide by our rules? It's actually more complicated, and it wasn't there in its present form when you used GIMPS software to discover that 2^2976221 - 1 is prime, but isn't that the gist of the current provision? [snip] If I was setting out to poach numbers, then I would simply setup a few 3.06 Ghz P4's and just start at the bottom of the list (smallest exponents) and let rip. So, unlike many other poachers who've declared themselves and their motives on this list or in the GIMPS Forum, you wouldn't care whether any of those exponents were, say, only 2 days from completion by the Primenet assignee? Is that correct? You wouldn't take the trouble to distinguish between an assignment that has an estimated 2 days to completion and one that had 200 days to completion? 1) Do you care to give us a direct answer to any of the questions I posed in the above paragraph, so that we have a clearer idea of just what you were referring to when you used that in your next sentence? 2) When you wrote bottom of the list, were you referring to a list derived from a Primenet-generated report? If anyone wanted to systematically poach, then that is a very simple approach. By that, do you mean an approach that excludes checking whether any of the Primenet assignments were very close to completion? [snip] Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime? [[snip]] Is there any particularly _special_ relationship between being a Mersenne prime discoverer and being trusted not to poach? Unless there is some such special relationship, I imagine that thousands of non-discoverers could also be trusted not to poach. Well in actual fact, there *is* now that you come to mention it. As a Mersenne Prime discoverer I am given immediate notification of any new MP immediately it is reported, ie *before* it is verified. We are trusted to keep it quiet.because when we discovered ours we proved that we were capable of _discretion_ Only the very, very few people who had the luck to choose, or to be assigned, to L-L test a Mersenne number that happened to be prime, along with a small number of others who were directly involved in the verification process, have had the very exclusive chance to demonstrate their discretion during the post-discovery verification phase. None of the other thousands of GIMPS participants have been given even a _chance_ to demonstrate that particular, very exclusive type of discretion. Can none of the latter category be trusted not to poach? Is there any special reason _why_ discretion during the Mersenne prime verification process should have a stronger correlation with nonpoaching trustworthiness than any other demonstration of discretion has? Richard Woods _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
Mersenne: GIMPS Forum
Our policy now is nobody owns the content... I guess that makes it public domain... Not exactly. Unless the posters specifically state that their posts are public domain, they still retain ownership. Even a note stating that a condition of posting is that what's posted is automatically released into the public domain could be easily contested I think. While it is easy to view this situation as a sinister plot, the truth of the matter is quite simple and benign... :) Hehe, that's usually the case but I'm glad to hear that you're willing to talk about it. I stopped posting to the forum on http://www.dpreview.com/ because although the site is absolutely terrific, the copyright page states that *everything* on the site is copyright by the owner. No exception is made for the forums. They even go so far as do reject liability for what people write, but seem to claim ownership non-the-less. I wrote the site admin three times about the discrepancy with no answer. I still use the site as a reference but my enthusiasm for is is far less than it used to be. I rarely write anything in the forums, and when I do it's nothing of *any* significance. A shame, really. Rick. -+--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alienshore.com/seeking/ _ Unsubscribe list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
