On Tuesday 22 October 2002 16:31, you wrote: > Yeah, well, we don't have a super cool Trojan horse program that can > update itself (and crash machines) like these other ones, and we're not > out there looking for ET or saving cancer boy or anything... just a > bunch of geeks looking for big numbers. :) (tongue planted firmly in > cheek here).
And we tend to run in the background, all the time, instead of wasting cycles waiting for a screen saver to kick in, then wasting even more cycles drawing "pretty" graphics :-P Probably we would get more participants if we had a screen saver version. This has been mentioned many times before. And, _are_ we just looking for "big numbers"? There are software applications for improved algorithms & implementations of algorithms developed for this project; there are engineering spinoffs - a couple of years ago, the problem was how to keep GHz+ CPUs cool enough to be reliable, now the problem is how to make systems quiet enough to live with as well; there are cryptological spinoffs, not withstanding the obvious point that knowledge of a few very large primes is not in itself useful ... for instance, has anyone considered using the sequence of residuals from a L-L test as a practical one-time pad? The problem with one-time pads is distributing the data - but you can effectively transmit a long sequence of residuals by specifying only the exponent and the start iteration, which can be transmitted securely using only a tiny fraction of your old one-time pad data ... OK, this is pretty geekish stuff, but so what? Regards Brian Beesley _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
