Whilst I was surfing I came across the word "Mersenne", even though I didn't search for it. After I had finished laughing, I had to tell you people.
The Hack Furby Challenge is a $250 prize offered by Peter van der Linden http://www.afu.com/fur.html for software to do something with a Furby. The original Hack Furby Challenge was won by Jeffrey Gibbons who supplied a Furby Upgrade Kit hardware, the new prize is for software. Peter van der Linden suggests "You can program Furby to solve mathematical puzzles and equations, to look for Mersenne prime numbers, or simply to act as a speaking clock." The $74 upgrade, http://www.appspec.net/products/UpgradeKits/FurbyUpgrade/root.html replaces the original 6502 CPU with a 20MHz 8051 with 1MByte of serial Flash RAM and 1152 bytes of normally accessible RAM. Clearly this is not enough to Lucas-Lehmer test big Mersennes, but it is enough to Reverse Factor 3072 bit factors upto 3072 bit exponents given a prime as an input. As Reverse Factoring (without factoring P-1) is asymptotically more productive at completely factoring any of all 2^N-1 compared with LL testing just prime exponents this shouldn't be a problem given enough batteries and patience. I will post my analysis of Reverse Factoring shortly. Paul Landon _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
