On Fri, 18 May 2001 14:47:49 -0400, George Woltman wrote:
>Another way to look at it. Roughly speaking supercomputers owned the
>region below 1.3M, GIMPS above that. We've roughly tested three "doublings"
>1.3M to 2.6M, 2.6M to 5.2M, 5.2M to 10.4M. There are 1.78 an
>expected Mersenne primes per doubling. GIMPS should have found 5.34 primes.
Another way to look at it is that we were unlucky with two doublings,
and slightly lucky with one.
Note that the M#35/M#36 split is, while nowhere near the widest known,
unusually wide, so we were unlucky there too.
These things, of course, are totally unpredictable - there is one
precedent for adjacent exponents (M127 and M521) having a ratio of
4.102, which means it wouldn't be a record even if we found no new
primes through the ~25M range. Here's hoping that isn't the case!
Nathan
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