> When a person tells the world which exponents he is testing, and
> continously reports his progress, people could at least complain to him
> before hijacking the exponents he has been testing for a year with the
> dream of becoming a discoverer of the next Mersenne prime. Stealing the
> exponent on purpose without even sending him an email is just plain wrong.
> This way you encourage him to send false progress reports or results to
> keep you away. "Heck, I send in this bogus result to keep people happy
> while I continue to check if this is a Mersenne prime. It will always
> take some time before someone double check it, so I would probably have
> more than enough time to get the real result."
If it makes you feel any better, I took the two posts from Yvan Dutil and
also went through the assignments list on Primenet and gathered about 14
exponents that I figured, quite reasonably, were abandoned.
Criteria I used were:
1) Original *quite* long time to complete
2) No check-ins for a period of at least 6 months.
You see, the real problem is that if I had a 486 that I wanted to use to LL
test a number in the 4M-5M range, and I specified that my machine is on 8
hours of the day, the expected completion date originally sent would in deed
be over a year in the future.
And since an exponent will only expire 60 days past the expected completion
date, these numbers which are almost entirely likely to be abandoned,
wouldn't show up in the Primenet "to be assigned" database for over a year
after the time it was checked out.
In some of those cases, the exponent, having been checked out nearly a year
ago, still had a year before it was expected to be done. And a good number
of those had NEVER had the progress updated since it was checked out.
I'm not out there just randomly grabbing numbers as you suggest.
Aaron
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