I agree that having your exponents poached is extremely annoying and can and probably does drive away new participants. When it happens repeatedly and when the person who does it, does so repeatedly and with a clear disregard to whether the exponents are being checked in regularly or not - Mary checks in her progress almost daily so clearly there is no real logic for an "intelligent" poacher to poach her exponents - it becomes extremely irritating and the GIMPS community needs to find a way to stop it.
I think - and as a couple of people have pointed this out before - when a double-check assignment is poached and the poacher turns the result in first the result should be accepted as it is currently. As regards the credit we can do one of two things. Either 1) Credit goes to the person who was assigned the doublecheck and the poacher gets nothing. Apart from the satisfaction of having moved the trailing edge and wasted their time and whatever. Or 2) The primenet server waits till the exponent expires in which case the credit goes to the poacher or if the person to whom the exponent was assigned returns a result gets credit. This way the occasional triple checks that help keep tabs on the error rate and such will keep coming in and credit will go where it is due. It will also greatly reduce the incentive for poaching. I hope George and Scott can incorporate this change without too much change in the server. Anurag _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
