On Wednesday 29 January 2003 01:07, Paul Missman wrote: > > You bring up an interesting point about the software, I suppose. I never > thought that George or Scott considered the software proprietary.
This whole area is a legal minefield ... Even open source software can be proprietized, e.g. the mess Microsoft have made of TCP/IP starting from the published BSD source. > I'd > think that a basic Lucas-Lehmer type software could be written without too > much headache, though I've never tried my hand at it. If you try, let us know how you get on. Making the thing _work_ is easy enough. Making it tolerably efficient, say better than 50% the speed of Prime95/mprime (or Glucas or Mlucas on other hardware) is a different matter altogether. Assuming you're starting from scratch, not just filching other people's DWT code. > > I do wonder at your assertion that, were I to discover a large prime by a > self written program, I would have to publish the program along with the > discovered prime. I'd imagine that, as long as the number could be > verified by independent means, it would be an publishable fact. Not being authorized to speak for EFF, my guess is that you may be right. However, what "independent means" are you going to use for the demonstration, if not established LL testing software? The numbers we're talking about are so large that other methods e.g. ECPP are _at least_ several orders of magnitude too slow to be viable, even if you had a large grid of supercomputers at your disposal. In any case, $100K is a lot more than you'd expect to be able to sell a LL testing program for - so disclosure of the source (at least the key working parts of it) would seem to be sensible. > > I'll admit that I didn't follow this poaching thread from the beginning. I > just noticed much more than the normal volume of Mersenne email, and > decided to see what was up. The Idea that someone can "poach" a number > still strikes me as humorous. It is a bit like me trying to copyright the > number1234567890. I doubt that the claim would hold much water if tested > in a court of law. This is a very interesting issue. The software, music and film industries are trying very hard to do just this sort of thing - and having considerable success in the courts. (Patenting software, and extending the life of copyright for absurd times). Don't forget that a digital recording, like anything else stored in a computer, is nothing more than a string of 0 and 1 bits, i.e. it can be thought of as simply a very large number. Don't forget also the hoo-ha over the publication of a prime number specially crafted to contain the source code of the DeCSS algorithm. > > Is the negative impact here that large groups of numbers are being tied up > for unreasonable lengths of time? Or is it that some lucky person might > just happen to stumble on a large prime, and publish it, while someone in > GIMPS/Primenet had it checked out for testing? I thought the negative impact was that a user assigned a job of work may be discouraged by finding that job of work made irrelevant by someone else doing the same job _and reporting the result to the same authority_. Especially when the "poacher" is using the statistics tables published by the project to select the jobs (s)he is going to "poach". The fact that the lowest outstanding exponent in some (arbitary) class may remain fixed for a long time doesn't bother me, but I can understand how it might irritate some people. As for the chance of a "poacher" "poaching" a prime discovery - well, at best these are much the same as anyone else's; in practise they're probably a lot worse, as many of the exponents being "poached" will have been recycled due to possible errors in a previous run, possibly more than once by the time the exponent is close enough to the "trailing edge" to be a "tempting target". > > If the latter, I'd have to say, in my mind, finding a large prime is pretty > much a crap shoot. However, I'd support some sort of reasonable timeout on > the "ownership" of numbers checked out from the database. Yes. And there is at present a sort of "timeout", it's just that it's possible to work around this by checking in every few months without actually doing any work. > Also, if I had > some magic insight into the probability of a particular number turning up > prime, I'd probably want to test it, even if I didn't "own" it. Good luck to you. My guess is that, if your "magic insight" was based on mathematics rather than "gambler's intuition", the "insight" would be worth considerably more than the actual discovery of the prime. Regards Brian Beesley _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
