Question about Pending Tests in the Statistics page

[Jwb52z]

Why does the number in the "Pending Tests" column keep going up and never gets near zero? Are new blocks being added faster than they are being tested? Also, how far do we know we can go on a particular K before we have to say "Well, we'll have to wait for computer technology to advance before we can go any further in the search?" I just always see the number of tests going up and down and fluctuating, but never very much.

[Frodo42]

As I understand it Pendings Tests is how many tests are being worked on out there.

So if it went to zero that would mean that nothing was happening for this project, which wouldn't be good (although someone has been talking about allocating all resources to sieve/doublecheck for a while, but I don't think that will ever happen).

[kugano]

Frodo's right, "pending tests" is not the number of tests that are in the work queues, but rather the number of tests currently being crunched by the client network.

The total number of tests remaining is actually unknown. Aside from some very rough statistical models that let us make educated guesses, it's impossible for us to know how far we'll have to test any given multiplier before we find a prime.

Re: "giving up," we won't. We have no plans to shut the project down, even if someone comes along and proves that solving the remaining multipliers would take thousands of years. It's possible that at some point in the future we'll switch to a different problem in number theory (in which case we might change the name?)... but this distributed computing project will still be around.

Note that there are no plans at the moment to actually switch problems! I'm just saying, if it comes down to the wire, we'll just find something else to do... we won't shut the project down completely. There's too much of an investment in it, and as we've proven, we are a powerful and productive project!

[Jwb52z]

Thanks for answering my questions, guys. One of the main reasons I asked is because some projects have said things like, "We can't or won't attempt this because the computing power or technology required is not available or infeasible to accomplish anything meaningful in a normal human lifespan." Granted, that's not an exact quote, but I think you can see what I mean.