Question about main client

[jasong]

I understand sieving because I've done it with Riesel Sieve. But when I have a yellow 17 in my taskbar and that project is running full steam, what the heck is it accomplishing? What is the task that would've taken my computer 9 days to complete if I hadn't decided to sieve?

[maddog1]

Well, it's just trying to prove that the k/n pair it crunches on is PRIME (actually *probable* prime...), which after all is the main project's task, ie finding a prime for all 17 k values.
Sieving and the rest of the subprojects can't do that, they are just more efficient time-wise to prove that a k/n pair is definitely NOT prime, which removes the need to test this with the "yellow 17" proggy and saves some time in the process too. As you have seen yourself PRP (=PRobable Prime) testing takes quite some time to finish, which will grow longer and longer as n increases.
Keep sieving, IMHO it's more fun-and that's where I have put my firepower too. :)
Hope this is clear enough for you-any more questions feel free to ask!

[TeeJay]

Originally posted by jasong
I understand sieving because I've done it with Riesel Sieve. But when I have a yellow 17 in my taskbar and that project is running full steam, what the heck is it accomplishing? What is the task that would've taken my computer 9 days to complete if I hadn't decided to sieve?

Yellow 17 = not running
Blue 17 = running
Is this not so ?

[maddog1]

This is correct. That is, unless someone is suffering from tritanopy, a rare form of color-blindness in which you can't see blue ;)
Assuming this is not the case here, I just sticked with the "running full steam" line to assume that jasong just put "yellow" in his description by mistake. :)

[wirthi]

Perhaps we're mistaking taskbar with system-tray here (or however you guys call that)?

The difference between yellow and blue is only the case in the system-tray. On the taskbar (and thus on the client-window itself) the icon is always yellow.