> This had been discussed earlier. Brian and I talked about it for a little
> while, he came up with the original idea.
Doh! Curse my memory! :-)
> > I think the idea has definite merit. If an error does occur,
> it's equally
> > likely to happen at any step along the way, statistically.
> Errors are every
> > bit as likely to happen on the very first iteration as they are
> during the
> > 50% mark, or the 32.6% mark, or on the very last iteration.
>
> True, but if the system is malfunctioning then the errors should start
> early.
Even more reason why it makes sense.
> > Just for example, every 10% along the way, it'll send it's
> current residue
> > to the Primenet server.
>
> I'm guessing that you mean a certain amount of the residue. Sending in
> 10 2meg files for *each* exponent in the 20,000,000 range would get very
> unwieldy, and inconvenient for people and primenet.
Just a partial residue, like the one sent at the end of the test. Even
smaller ones, like a 32 bit instead of 64 bit residue seems like it would do
the job splendidly.
> > I forget the numbers being tossed around,
> > but you'd only save 50% of (the error rate) of the
> > checking time.
>
> As I pointed out above, the error rate should increase with the
> square of the
> exponent (plus change). This means that if 1% have errors at
> 7mil, 22% will
> have errors at 30mil.
Frightening to think so. Are you sure the error rate increases? Errors
seem like they'd show up more as a result of faulty hardware, to my
thinking. I'd imagine that if a certain machine ran through about 10 10M
exponent error free, it has a very high likelihood of running a single 20M
exponent error free.
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