An artifact of pasting from Rstudio.
If you look at the source of any forum's page you will probably be even more amazed -- if you like to look at imaginary things with a microscope, that is. They [I]are[/I] there - yet we don't see them, and frankly we don't want to see them. Playfully :rolleyes:.

[QUOTE=Gordon;422107][URL="https://www.google.co.uk/#q=gordon+spence+mersenne+prime"]This :-)[/URL]

Plus, if you're lucky, Don Knuth calls you at home for a quick chat...[/QUOTE]

That's weird. I get very different results when I google for my name + mersenne prime. :smile: Lucky you!

Can we take a look at the press release and offer suggestions before it's actually released?

[QUOTE=Batalov;422111]Playfully :rolleyes:.[/QUOTE]

It's all cool.

Remember, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. (That's intended to reference the game of Go.)

[QUOTE=Dubslow;422114]Can we take a look at the press release and offer suggestions before it's actually released?[/QUOTE]

No.

[QUOTE=airsquirrels;422094]I can't answer that specifically, but I can say that one of the big drivers of a new prime is drawing new users to donate cycles to GIMPs. Having been around press releases for a while, keeping everything under wraps until one big push that gets picked up with wide coverage will generate significantly more interest and traffic and hopefully new users than mentioning 7x,xxXxXx here. That would probably be picked up by a few places and trickle the news out less effectively.

Also I believe there is a desire to be 100% sure before marking the prime as validated. We are still waiting for two other tests, even if we are 99% sure it is better to avoid egg on our faces.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, there have been false positives before so verifying stuff before any kind of announcement is the decent thing to do. I'd guess on reason George even let on that we have a potential new prime is that I'd already done a double-check (on an Intel + Prime95, so it didn't count as a cross-check) and matched, otherwise he wouldn't have said anything publicly.

Last time there was a false positive we did a verification and it came up composite and nobody besides the direct people involved even knew. :smile:

There's also the issue of the prize money. This isn't an EFF award and there's a record of who and when, but when there's cash on the line I think that responsible disclosure is a good thing. If this were a 100M digit prime, the last thing we'd want is some rat fink figuring it out and trying to claim they discovered it first. Sure, they might have a hard time proving that but who needs that hassle.

And the press release should be the culminating event when the new prime is announced. It's good PR and brings positive attention to the project. Having the info come out beforehand in drips and drabs kind of steals the thunder. It's why companies time press releases for maximum visibility, for instance (I know AirSquirrels knows this, I'm just replying to BloodIce's comments).

[QUOTE=bloodIce;422092].... I understand the publicity fiasco, but in this thread people are almost having [B]heart attacks[/B] if another digit gets to be known, or the FFT size, or the range, or the third from the last iteration residue, etc....[/QUOTE]

If that's a reference to my comment, look up hyperbole in the dictionary. Sorry, I thought it was obvious? Um... I wasn't *really* going to die or anything.

Or are you being funny and it totally whooshed over my head? :confused2:

/philosophical musings/
 

[QUOTE=axn;422031]If M50 turns out to be the next unverified exponent after M49 (and there are no other smaller primes), will that pull down the CI enough to reject Wagstaff's as well. Alternately, how high should M50 be (with enough precision to not compromise the identity of M49) to keep Wagstaff in play?[/QUOTE]
Well, we and even our grandchildren's grandchildren will only have a [I]sample[/I] from the [I]population[/I] of M-primes. So, any statistical inference is just that, an inference. If we will find a few more M-primes in short succession, we will become less confident in Wagstaff's conjecture (and even less confident in Eberhart's) but we will never rule them out with just statistical data. If we may try to be Bayesians (I've been raised a frequentist but this has to change if I want to work productively in bioinformatics), then that's all there is - we change our [I]posteriors[/I] ever so slightly but get nowhere in terms of absolute truths.*

The proof is another matter entirely, but even if we had a proof of either of the conjectures, we still would have no clue where exactly next prime is.

As to your specific question: it is dangerous to answer.
:not-sure:
Let's reiterate when M49 is published.


____________
*For me, this exercise is a proxy to getting into a mind of a bench biologist (or a former bench scientist who becomes a department or a program director). This is perhaps how they (at least intuitively) think: "well, we tried this, and we tried that, this colony shrunk, and these five dozen, too, so I don't believe [I]this-or-that[/I] theory any more. Why don't we switch to something else". Thought they have their theories (pathways, division cycles, associations of phenotypes to genotypes, etc) everything appears to them as if "[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Corinthians_13#.22Through_a_glass.2C_darkly.22"]through a glass, darkly[/URL]". They operate in beliefs. No biological theory is absolute -- like, say, a law of gravity or a Mendeleev's table. All Bayesian - less belief, more belief... Need to get into and operate with their mindset to work with them. Took quite a few classes to get up to speed. The whole Caffo/Peng/Leek Data Science 10 course set looks quite good. I jumped straight into chapter 7, as it happens.

George said there wasn't a reason to hide the exponent after M42,643,801 was discovered: [url]http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=176012&postcount=50[/url]

I guess the false positives we've had in the past few years made him change his mind.

I wonder if I still have the SMS when George sent me the M38 candidate. I was at my nephews baptism reception, IIRC. Couldn't wait to get the check started.

Good times.

It's time for the GIMPS server to have options to tweet / facebook wall-posts / blogs / vlogs / <<fill in additional fads>>... when your [STRIKE]PC[/STRIKE] phone finds a prime.
Or else the server's age is showing (even after the much needed facelifts).
Gotta keep up with the Joneses! :brian-e: