"Brian J. Beesley" wrote:
> On 14 Oct 99, at 18:15, Chris Jefferson wrote:
> Surely this isn't really an issue. PrimeNet would surely recognise a
> result submitted by a "poacher" as such & either disqualify it
> automatically, or credit the actual owner of the assignment instead
> of the "poacher".
Except that PrimeNet doesn't control the prize. This is the error everybody is doing.
EFF is adminstrating the competition and prize, given by anonymous donaters to
advance distributed computing / mathemathical algorithms on computers. PrimeNet is
just one of the organizations (With largest changes known!) to get that prize, but it
doesn't decide upon who gets it. The first person to present a prime filling the
requirements will - and that's why result-files "few iterations short" will be worth
more than their weight in gold.
Somebody else said: Users _should_ backup etc. Well, you've all already seen how
people "blame" GIMPS for having .txt documentation and no nifty user-interface. You
think the backup-issue will be any different? My reference to Prime95/mprime being
"no maintenance"... At the worst case you're dealing with a thousand machines
crunching away with assignemts got off the net, and sent back. How and where are you
going to backup all that data? Assuming there's automatic backup, fine... but let's
face it, most "personal computer owners" whom form the majority of GIMPS users I'm
sure _don't_ make backups even of their other data.
You said... about making the repository write-only. And you seem to completely miss
the point; the discussion here has centered around how to solve the problem that
PrimeNet doesn't have the bandwidth or storage space to backup the intermediary
files! So my suggestion was "distributed storage". This will solve the backup
problem, but yes the above-mentioned prize-claim and double-check problem remains.
Unfortunately, I think in that respect we're stuck.
-Donwulff
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