Gordon Spence wrote: > Of course, as this is a *public* volunteer project, there > are a lot of us, who have been in the project for a long-time > (6+ years)
... which got me wondering when I started, which was: Sun, 08 Dec 1996 (at least that's when I requested my first range) 6 years, 48 days as of today. > who regularly look through these for no other reason than > we *want* to. Okay, I *want* to, too. But suppose there's a correlation between ability to browse _other_ people's assignment status info (you can always see your own complete assignment info), and ability to select poaching targets on the basis of other people's assignment status info? It seems worth discussing possible ideas for reducing the second even if it means reducing the first, not necessarily by the same proportion. >> That would deny target-selecting information to would-be >> poachers, right? > > No. If I was setting out to "poach" numbers - which in > itself is a moot point. You don't *own* an exponent, they > are after all simply numbers. I think there's a fairly well-established consensus that in the context of GIMPS/Primenet, "to poach" means "to run a (L-L, usually) test while it is assigned by Primenet to a different GIMPS participant" or something similar. There's another consensus that Primenet assignments mean something like a reservation as is used in other cooperative computational projects to avoid duplicated effort. > If I was setting out to "poach" numbers, then I would > simply setup a few 3.06 Ghz P4's and just start at the > bottom of the list (smallest exponents) and let rip. So, unlike many other poachers who've declared themselves and their motives on this list or in the GIMPS Forum, you wouldn't care whether any of those exponents were, say, only 2 days from completion by the Primenet assignee? Is that correct? You wouldn't take the trouble to distinguish between an assignment that has an estimated 2 days to completion and one that had 200 days to completion? > Complete an exponent every day or so. So some of them > might be completed before me, so what, we then have a > "triple" check. If someone wants to do it, you won't > stop them. My proposal was not aimed at stopping that sort of "blind" poaching. (And I disclaimed that it would stop ALL of any type of poaching.) > You are missing the point about it being useful to have > "triple" checks. No, I'm not. I readily agree that triplechecks have some value. Perhaps you and I differ as to how that value ranks relative to values of some other things, like the value of a poach-free Primenet assignment? >> Make the current assignments report password-protected, >> then substitute a new public assignments report that >> omits the above four items. >> >> Do the system administrators currently need the eyes and >> attention of others to detect stragglers _about whom >> action needs to be taken_? If not, then why provide >> this information to poachers? If so, just give some >> other trusted individuals the password for the full >> assignments report. > > Are you putting yourself forward as one of the trusted > individuals? Trusted not to poach (as is meant in this context) -- yes, just as would thousands of other GIMPSers be, I imagine. But I don't have time to devote to the sort of report monitoring or usage that some others do, so I wouldn't request report access or volunteer to monitor in the first place. > Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club > of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime? As long as you could be trusted by system administrators not to poach, sure. Is there any particularly _special_ relationship between being a Mersenne prime discoverer and being trusted not to poach? Unless there is some such special relationship, I imagine that thousands of non-discoverers could also be trusted not to poach. Richard Woods _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
