Gordon Spence wrote: [snip] >> 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. > > I think we all agree on how it's supposed to work
So you agree that there should be no poaching of Primenet assignments -- right? Or by "it", were you not including Primenet? [snip] > they are after all *just numbers*. Nobody owns them and So by "they" and "them" you _do_ mean just the numbers, without any consideration of GIMPS or Primenet - correct? > anyone in the world can work on whatever they want Well, sure. But that's irrelevant to my proposal. My proposal concerned the GIMPS/Primenet system, not the whole world. > without anyone's permission. Isn't there something in the current GIMPS/Primenet software along the lines of "if you use our software, you agree to abide by our rules"? It's actually more complicated, and it wasn't there in its present form when you used GIMPS software to discover that 2^2976221 - 1 is prime, but isn't that the gist of the current provision? [snip] >> > 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? 1) Do you care to give us a direct answer to any of the questions I posed in the above paragraph, so that we have a clearer idea of just what you were referring to when you used "that" in your next sentence? 2) When you wrote "bottom of the list", were you referring to a list derived from a Primenet-generated report? > If anyone wanted to systematically poach, then that is a > very simple approach. By "that", do you mean an approach that excludes checking whether any of the Primenet assignments were very close to completion? [snip] >> > Or how about myself, as one of the *very* exclusive club >> > of people who have actually discovered a Mersenne prime? >> [[snip]] >> >> 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. > > Well in actual fact, there *is* now that you come to > mention it. As a Mersenne Prime discoverer I am given > immediate notification of any new MP immediately it is > reported, ie *before* it is verified. We are trusted to > keep it quiet.....because when we discovered ours we > proved that we were capable of _discretion_ Only the very, very few people who had the luck to choose, or to be assigned, to L-L test a Mersenne number that happened to be prime, along with a small number of others who were directly involved in the verification process, have had the very exclusive chance to demonstrate their discretion during the post-discovery verification phase. None of the other thousands of GIMPS participants have been given even a _chance_ to demonstrate that particular, very exclusive type of discretion. Can none of the latter category be trusted not to poach? Is there any special reason _why_ discretion during the Mersenne prime verification process should have a stronger correlation with nonpoaching trustworthiness than any other demonstration of discretion has? Richard Woods _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
