> Increasing the difficulty for a poacher to _find_ a tempting target > would mean other participants could be less concerned about making > themselves into such a target, and just concentrate on doing the work > they considered most suitable within the rules.
If the rules you are referring to include the possible new guidelines George proposes (which in a nut shell goes something like this -- snips taken from a couple of posts on the forum by George) "Consensus seems to be building around a sliding scale. It's 2 to 3 months for the smallest double-checks and first-time tests (to avoid holding up milestones), 6 months for recycled exponents, 12 months for an exponent at the leading edge. 2+ years for a 33M exponent. Give or take." "A leading edge first time test today is unlikely to hold up a milestone for maybe 2 years. I'm not advocating yanking a reservation just because you've had it one year. I think we are proposing reassignment if you take more than a year and some other criteria is met such as: a) You aren't making significant progress. b) You are holding up a milestone. c) Require the user to fill out a web form saying "I'm still working on it" " Then in fact, those guidelines are more stringent than ANY poaching methodology I've seen to date (including Malfoy's) other than some willy-nilly poacher who has no methodology at all (which I believe in most cases turn out to be a previous "owner" turning in the assignment from a expired owner 1 or 2 assignments ago). So in order to keep within these guidelines "suitable" types of work for a given machine would just so happen to avoid much of any chance of getting poached TODAY. Which brings to mind another part of Georges proposal which I don't see a easy *snip* for. The basic jest is that the new server would assign work to clients based upon this ideology, in other words the new server would be careful not to assigned a trailing edge exponent to historically "slow" computer. I whole heartily believe the best way to eliminate poaching is to minimize the reasons there are poachers to begin with rather than trying to make it more difficult to do. Even masking the exponents has a big loop hole in that it would take years to become effective even if implemented today. All that has to be done is to save a copy of status.txt today and you know a very very big chunk of the exponents that will fall in the trailing edge of the assignment list of many many years. After that it's a trivial matter of elimination to deduce which is which when masked. Shane _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
