Well, you are right Lucas. So we'll tell ET that's how we did it. :-) Boy, will we get credit for being smart ! At 04:21 PM 6/15/99 -0400, you wrote: >>I was thinking about this last night. If you could keep track of the >>divisions for the last Mersenne, you could keep that as a starting point. So >>for example, take M37, and keep track of how many times you did your modulo >>and what the divisor was. Then you could conceptually get back to what >>S(M37) was w/o the modulo by multiplying M37*(sum of divisors) or something >>along those lines. It would at least save you some time, sure there's a big >>modulo calculation in the beginning, and I'm sure the number is friggin' >>huge, but it can be represented as (2^p-1)*(some number). > >Well, friggin' huge doesn't even begin to describe it. There aren't enough >quanta in the universe to hold it. With each sqaring, it aproximatly >doubles the number of binary digits, so that number would be aproximatley >2^(2^(p-1)) binary digits long (probably way off by a factor of 2^1000000, >or something, but when it gets that big, that doesn't matter). > >-Lucas Wiman ________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
