My FAQ for dummies (beta)

[OmbooHankvald]

Hi, I hope it's okay to ask questions such as this in this forum. If not, sorry!

I'm a complete n00b at math in general, but I surfed around on some sites explaining the Sierpinski Prob and decided to try and write down my own questions and then try to answer them. I guess I made a FAQ. I would love to host it but I don't have a website and besides I suck at HTML and all that.
So I've uploaded it temporary to a free service. It's at http://omboohankvald.l1h.net/sierpinski.htm

I just wanted to ask you if it's right? Have I misunderstood things or what? What can be better? All such stuff.

Someday I may be able to use it to recruit new machines in my neighbourhood

I hope you'll give me some kind of response and help me make it better, 'cause right now I think it sucks very much?

Thanks
Omboo

P.S. I know the colours are ugly. Look at the contents, not the appearance (my motto)

[Frodo42]

I think you should consider adding this to the Wiki that has been made for SoB.
It would be great if we could start building a FAQ there ... hell I might even try to figure out how to use the Wiki to add to some of the answers you have given yourself.

Your answers and questions look pretty good and easy to understand.
I haven't read through them all yet so I am not able to say if all your answers are correct ... I will probably not be able to so even when I have read through it all, even though I have been with this problem for quite some time now .

[Greenbank]

Heh! Good work!

I just as I posted my "basic questions" (albeit in the Sieving forum by mistake, would be grateful if someone could move it here).

I just have a couple of questions regarding the Proth test (see my post) and I should be good to go.

I'm sure we can combine this stuff and get something going on the wiki.

[vjs]

Excellent and I like the humour...

I also have some suggestions

Q: What is a composite?
A: All numbers (above 0) that are not primes are composites

... are composites since they are divisable by another number. (This number is a factor of the composite)

Q: What does it do?

A: To make a long story short: it eliminates many k/n pairs faster by trial division (Remember composite). This also makes the process of finding primes in (k•2^n)+1 easier faster because of almost all of the k/n combinations have been factored out. How many have been factored out? More than half already!!!

Q: Is there any other way to find factors?

A: Yes, there are other programs like P-1 factoring but start with sieve first while you learn.

[OmbooHankvald]

Hi vjs and thanks for the input. I'm adding it now

However, I did not add your suggestion about trial factoring because I believe that I need to understand the things before I start sounding like I know them . And I frankly don't understand the word "trial factoring". I know what sieving is about (from Wikipedia), but I'm still not sure... What is the difference between the kn^2+1 way of eliminating k/n pairs and the sieving way to do it?

Maybe I'll find out when I've had a good nights :sleepy: anyway.

On second note: Another reason for explaining every little thing about the Sierpinski (apart from recruiting the newbies), is because I think there's a lot of n00b crunchers who haven't got English as their native language (heck. I'm 17 years and from Denmark and there's a lot of math-words that I haven't got a clue what means). So I decided to cook up something so that even people who don't know anything of math still might understand a little bit of the theory behind the project.

Omboo