On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Alexander Kruppa wrote:
> David Slowinski contacted George, asking him wether Prime95 could test
> numbers >1 million bits. He had just discovered that M1257787 was prime
> - when George's own computer was only a few days from finishing that
> very exponent! David also asked for an independet verification of the
> prime, so suddenly the LL run on George's computer that had almost
> discovered GIMPS' first prime was no more than a double check for
> David's success.
>
> To make matters worse, Slowinski delayed the announcement of the prime
> as he "was out of town" for a while - which turned out to be the better
> part of half a year. I think I would have flipped. Living for half a
> year with such a freak incident on your mind and not even being able to
> tell anyone.
> OTOH, it's an impressive example of how to keep a secret.
Ooof, so if Slowinski had gone out of town without contacting George, or
had contacted someone else for independant verification, George's computer
would have found the prime, and could have announced the discovery before
Slowinski returned, and boy, wouldn't that have been a huge snarl over who
got credit. Not to mention that someone other than George or Slowinski
could have found it too.
On a purely technical note, I've just been assigned an exponent that
expired from someone else. I looked at the active exponent report from
just before it was expired, and it looks like the exponent was about one
third done before it expired. In the event that the other person does
eventually check back in, is there a mechanism in place to either tell his
machine or mine that it should abandon the exponent (it's a double check
LL assignment, so two tests don't need to be run), or would we just end up
both continuing on the same exponent, ending with it triple checked?
Given how long this person had the exponent compared to the progress on
it, it is likely that I would finish long before him anyway.
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