-----Original Message-----
From: Brian J. Beesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Nathan Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 15 May 2001 23:57
Subject: Re: Mersenne: Re: 26 exponents
>Actually I think that there may be a perceptual problem with many new
>users in that they may give up as soon as they realize that a "most
>sense" assignment is going to take several weeks to complete.
>Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to fix this!
I think this could be a significant problem.
I'm currently 46% of the way through double-checking M6193307, and I'm
expecting to complete it on 26 July. Last time I dropped bellow 90 days
queued work, I requested a factorisation, just to see what the range was. I
got M16065053, which I expect to complete on 6 September - nearly six weeks
to do the fastest possible assignment. This doesn't bother me now - I
wouldn't be bothered if it took a year or more - but when I started, I was
keen to return a result. OK, you might think a slow machine like mine would
be no great loss to the project, but I'm not going to have this abacus for
ever.
One improvement would be to credit people with work done each time they check
in, instead of only when they return a result. That way they can see
themselves on the producer charts more or less immediately.
Another possibility would be to extend the project to search for something
else - there must be many other interesting number-theoretic questions
involving primes which are not currently being researched in depth, and which
could benefit from a distributed approach. We already do this with
factorisations which do not contribute to the search for a Mersenne prime.
There must be many people who started off doing factorisations before moving
on to double-checks and first-time LLs.
[...]
>> Perhaps clicking the 'give me the work that makes the most sense' box
>> should immediately set the appearance of the others to the work that
>> will be chosen, rather than simply graying them out.
>
>Agreed.
Does the client 'know' the threshold performance level for double-checks and
factorisations? If so, is it hard-coded, or does it get this information from
the server? If hard-coded, then you have a problem with people continuing to
use older clients which tell them that it still makes 'most sense' to do
first-time checks, long after it has become more sensible to do double-checks
or factorisations.
Regards
Brian Beesley
Daran G.
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