As soon as I heard that there was a $100,000 prize available for finding a
prime, I decided to switch to the 10m digit test, even though my chances
of finding it were extreemly small. I mean, the tiny chance of winning
that cash is better than leaving your idle CPU time idle, right ?
Unfortunately, this cash prize had clouded my thoughts, as I fortunately
realized when my girlfriend told me she opted not to switch to the 10m
digit tests, because she was more interested in getting her name in the
history books than getting $100,000, and there was is a significantly
greater chance of finding the next prime than there is of finding the 1st
10m digit prime.
That's one of 2 reasons I think this prize money was set up badly.
The second is that I think it will result in more people getting
frustrated, giving up, and quitting, than it will incourage people to
participate and get the program running on more computers, because of the
fact that it takes about 2 years to check one number for primality on pII,
and numbers cannot be split up and tested by multiple computers
simultaneously.
It was what, half a million dollars total ? I think it would have been
much better to award $25k per new prime discovered for the next 20 primes.
__________________________________________________________________
PGP fingerprint = 03 5B 9B A0 16 33 91 2F A5 77 BC EE 43 71 98 D4
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://www.op.net/~darxus
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