I managed to grab a bunch of those 4.5M doublechecks that George released on Jan 10th. A few days ago, when my machine was about to finish up the second one of the batch I grabbed, the account k5gj submitted a result for this exponent. A little investigation showed that this account does this frequently, submitting results for the low exponents on the Assigned Exponents Report, without actually having that exponent assigned to them and without regard for whether the exponent is being actively checked in or worked on. Six out of the lowest 10 exponents released in this batch have been "poached" by this account, and two have since turned into triple checks because of this, resulting in a lot of waste. This account is apparently owned by Tom Cage. I obtained his email address from the mailing list archives, and sent an email to him asking why he had done this, and whether he intended to continue steamrolling the rest of my exponents with his very fast machine.
To date, I have not received any answer from Tom Cage, and I'm somewhat hesitant to start work on the rest of exponents right now, as I do not want my work to be wasted. From his old mailing list articles, he seems to be a long time participant in GIMPS, and perhaps someone has a better contact address for him than [EMAIL PROTECTED] Any assistance in contacting him would be appreciated. I would like to get back to work on these exponents. I know that the last time this came up, a lot of people said poaching was no problem anymore. Well, from doing a lot of work in the low doublecheck area, I can tell you that it is still a problem. The account nuutti that I wrote about before, as well as accounts beth133 and kiste are also heavily involved in poaching this area of exponent "space". Unlike Tom Cage, they appear to try to pick their targets with some intelligence, but I would point out that exponents that are going to expire would expire anyway (and there are people who legitimately pick up low expiring exponents to make sure they get done, both account djaquay and I do it on a regular basis, and there are others who do it on an occasional basis), and having an exponent out for more than a couple of months while slowly working on it is not holding up GIMPS in any real sense. Poaching is probably doing more harm to GIMPS than good, given that getting an "exponent already tested" error, or not getting any credit when you do finally turn in a result is quite likely to frustrate many people into leaving GIMPS, and while they might have a slow machine now, who knows they might get a shiny new P4 some day, but they'll be very unlikely to come back to GIMPS with it. So I would urge anybody who knows how to contact the owners of these accounts to please ask them to stop this. If we reach a major milestone (like proving M38) and all other exponents except the slowpokes are done (or if the slowpokes are causing problems with PrimeNet, and I've seen no evidence of that), *then* might be the time to do something about it, but who cares if it takes 9 months for someone to finish something if it'll be a year before the milestone is reached. Mary Conner _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
