Taking that a bit further, the difficulty of opening the boxes is proportional to the square of the box number, and the overall chance of finding a diamond (taking into account how hard it is to open the box as well as the likelihood of a given box containing a diamond) is inversely proportional approximately to the cube of the box number times the logarithm of the box number. Diamonds in higher numbered boxes are much harder to find. You really don't want to miss the easy ones, ever.
The allure of progressing twice as fast is obvious, but the penalty for missing a prime is tremendous.
Mike, please check your email for my results.txt files.
Greetings,
about the double check discussion.
I like to remind you guys that at least one of the primes was found via secondpass - that means a prime was missed with the firstpass tests, aka we already had a false negative - right in the SoB project. (the one at ~3M)
Chris
Is there any word on the SeventeenOrBust project?
Just emailed a results.txt - close to 5 years worth
If I can find the others I will send them too
I also believe double checks are worth it. Basically, if we have a 5% error rate, then it's even faster to find a prime if we can complete a double check in 1/20th the time of an initial check.
A recent change at GIMPS is to send out a double check assignment to everyone when they first join and once every year. This helps the project find bad computers quickly so their work can be double checked immediately. Sending out a double check at the beginning is also good in that new users get to finish something sooner.
I did say I'd let you know as soon as I heard anything, so here it is. It's not good news, unfortunately.
There's no hope of recovering the data or software from the SoB server. It's gone. SoB is not coming back.
Louie has asked us to take over the entire SoB search. We intend to do so, but I can't tell you exactly what that means. For now, we are crunching all 6 Ks in the 31M < n < 32M range, and we'll continue with that until we decide how to move forward.
You are all, of course, welcome to come on over to PrimeGrid and help with SoB.
I'd like, at this point, to sincerely thank everyone who sent us their log files. Of all the information we've been able to gather from different sources, I suspect that your log files may end up being the most useful. They contain the most recent information, regarding the largest tasks. Those are most useful.
Thanks for the update, bad news is better than not knowing. I've been peeking at this forum and PrimeGrid's forum every few days to see if there's been any updates.
Want some good news?
There's now 5 Ks remaining in the Sierpinski Problem.