Bug in top5000's score page?
 

I don't know whether anyone has noticed this yet, but there seems to be a bug on Chris Caldwell's top5000 site. When you click on "top projects sorted by (normalized) score", [url]http://primes.utm.edu/bios/top20.php?type=project&by=ScoreNormal[/url]

you get this result:

[code]
normalized project primes score
69395 Seventeen or Bust 11 51.3943[/code]
17 or bust's normalized score has decreased a lot over the past few months - it went from well over 100,000 to under 70,000 now. However, its score has always remained at 51.3943 since at least the beginning of the year. Shouldn't its score have gone down to 50.9 or some other similar value?

The score of the 11 primes they found does not change, but their score might reduce if one of their primes dropped out of the top-5000.
However, since they were quite large that has not happened in a hurry.

The last paragraph [B]below[/B] the table on the Top-5000 page sheds some light on this:[QUOTE]Note that if a project stops finding primes, its normalized score will steadily drop as the size of the 5000th primes steadily increases. The non-normalized scores drop too, but not as quickly because they only drop when the project's primes are pushed off the list.[/QUOTE]
Seen here:
[url]http://primes.utm.edu/bios/top20.php?type=project&by=ScoreNormal[/url]

I hope that helps.

Does that mean that it would be possible for some other project to have a lower score than 17 or bust even though that project's normalized score is higher?

Have a look at the actual and normalized scores on the table and tell me what you see.

Whilst it does help to ask the question, you do need to read back your own question and attempt to answer it. This way, when you observe the answer you will understand it better than if someone were to tell you it is 'just so'.

If you are very concerned about this and have evidence to support your hypothesis, may I suggest you address the question with Professor Chris Caldwell who runs that website.

In actual fact I did observe 1 tiny 'apparent' inconsistency on a completely different page whilst reviewing your questions. However, that was unrelated and, I suspect, due to the order-by sequence in a database query and not of the score values. Not anything serious enough to bother the Professor about, in my opinion.