At 02:40 PM 12/5/2001 -0800, Mary Conner wrote:
> > 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.
Keeping the secret was easy. I had promised David.
>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.
Probably not. One of the reasons we tell past Mersenne discoverers
immediately is to "stake our claim". I know David contacted Richard
Crandall immediately and he probably contacted others.
If had not contacted me directly, when my computer found M#34 and
I then relayed the exciting news to Dr. Crandall, he would have given me
the bad news.
Slightly off topic, someone at the time (a non-GIMPSer) said no way I just
missed out on M#34. The odds must be one in a million. So I calculated that
a) given there is a Mersenne prime in the 1.2 millions, and
b) given that a Cray found it, and
c) given that there were about 40 GIMPS Pentiums working in
the 1.2 million area at the time, and
d) given the time it takes the average Pentium to do an LL test (I've
since forgotten that value), then
What is the chance that the two competing groups would both find the
Mersenne prime within a week of each other?
The answer turned out to be 3%. Not likely, but a far cry from 1 in a million.
>On a purely technical note, 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
No. The server never contacts the client. That's too much of a security
risk in my book.
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