----- Original Message ----- From: "Torben Schl�ntz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brian J. Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 10:04 PM Subject: SV: SV: SV: Mersenne: Drifting UP(!) in Top Producers ranking?
> I'd rather not like the "penalty"/ punishment. A reward equal to > the full effort of doing the TF would be much better - and under those > circumstances no one would try to cheat because a factor found at eg. 63 > bits would reward very well. That would allow another cheat. Current Factoring assignments are prefactored to 2^57, and are intended to be factored to 2^67. If someone were instead just to factor to 2^58, they would have about a 1/58 chance of getting a full credit for less than 1/500th of the effort. If not, then the exponent could be abandoned. This would also have the advantage (from the cheat's POV) of 'poisoning' potential competitors' factoring efforts. IMO people should expect (in the mathematical sense of the word) to get the same amount of credit irrespective of what type of work they do. Also credit should be given for work (honestly) done irrespective of whether the search was successful. The first criterion (only) could be met by crediting only found factors, and giving a higher credit for larger ones, up to the TF limit. I do not think there is any way to allocate credit that meets both criteria, which wouldn't reward cheating in some way. Brian's suggestion is a good one, but I would add that perhaps each user could get an allowance, proportionate to the number of TF assignments returned, that would be deemed to be 'honest' errors, and not penalised. P-1 (which I do almost exclusively) seems to be woefully ill-rewarded. > tsc Daran G. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
