Odd perfect related road blocks II

[Zeta-Flux]

In case people had lost track of the discussion, here are all of the relevant posts I could find (in this thread) where Silverman disses the OPN computations, and people respond.

358-> 360,
361-> 362,363,
364-> 365,
456-> Edit by mod, 457
459-> 460,461,462,465,
463-> 464,
466-> 467,
485-> 486,
709-> 710,716,718,
712-> 713,714,715,
719-> 720,
721&722-> 723,725,

[Zeta-Flux]

I also notice that you continue with insults, characterizing my
technical criticism as a 'personal rant'.

Hypocrite.

I seem to recall a certain poster who took umbrage at my mistaken use of "supernova" instead of "red giant." And said poster called me an "ignorant religious extremist." William a hypocrite?

[wblipp]

... long, clever, but contentious post deleted before posting in the interest of promoting amiciable relations ...

I shall interpret "it is not any one particular factorization that is pointless" as a retraction of your comment that this one particular factorization was pointless. Apology accepted. I also apologize for petty squabbling - let's get back to number theory fun.

The work that you are doing now to push the state of the art, combined with Moore's law, means that in a few years we OPN enthusiasts will be factoring numbers that are impossible now, but will be far behind the state of the art at that future time. I suppose we are doomed to repeat this perpetual discussion at that future time.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by wblipp

... long, clever, but contentious post deleted before posting in the interest of promoting amiciable relations ...

I shall interpret "it is not any one particular factorization that is pointless" as a retraction of your comment that this one particular factorization was pointless.

Apology accepted.

No apology was offered.

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

No apology was offered.

Not explicitly. But a retraction is an implicit apology, and a retraction was explicitly made. I was merely explicit in my acceptance of the implicit apology.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by wblipp

Not explicitly. But a retraction is an implicit apology, and a retraction was explicitly made. I was merely explicit in my acceptance of the implicit apology.

No retraction either. These calculations to extend the lower bound on OPN's
are pointless.

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

No retraction either. These calculations to extend the lower bound on OPN's
are pointless.

if you think it can be done quicker then use the method you want and beat them to it.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by debrouxl

Indeed, it would be sad if the field of integer factoring were reserved to the small group of researchers at the leading edge, and their special tools, while the rest of us would be left in the dark

So? What does blind use of tools written by others actually contribute
other than CPU time? New ideas? New code? Better parameterizations?

NFS@Home is currently setting the difficulty record for a SNFS factorization with a b^n-1 number, namely 2^1061-1. .

And in the process they continue to advance the state of the art.
Just recently it implemented a new scheme for parallel BL.

What contributions do these mundane factorizations make? (i.e. as reported
in this thread)

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by philmoore

You may find this pointless, but I find it fascinating: If the Ochem-Rao paper survives scrutiny, it proves that the perfect numbers generated by the five Mersenne primes discovered by Raphael Robinson in 1952 are the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth perfect numbers in order of size, but it took 59 years to prove this! You admit that the Ochem-Rao paper has merit, but are you even aware that their result uses many of the factorizations in this thread that you are disparaging?

I am acutely aware since I reviewed the paper and participated
in the discussions. But the value in that paper lies in the new mathematics.
Merely raising the lower bound provides very little value. It does nothing
toward help proving the conjecture; nor can it do so.

I suggest you all read the essay that I wrote in the AMS Notices
entitled 'A Persepective on Computational Number Theory'. I don't
recall the exact date: sometime around 1990. I received a general
consensus from a number of people that the view expressed in that
essay [that calculations that merely change a bound] have very little
value in practice.

I suggest that ALL of you who continue these mundane calculations
change to doing something that will help push the state-of-the-art, or
change to something that has the potential to solve an open problem.
There are a fair number of such projects available. These mundane NFS
runs have almost no value.

It is also a matter of historical record that some noted mathematicians
shared a similar view. Oliver Atkins was known for two quotes back in the
80's: He referred to the Cunningham Project as "Wagstaff's Stamp
Collection", and was also heard to say that "these factorizations are just
a distraction from doing real mathematics". And although I can't confirm it
(because it was a private conversation) even Dick Lehmer said to me back
in the late 80's: "Let's finish off these (the then current version of the
Cunningham tables) tables and do something else.

It is one thing to work at the leading edge in order to improve factoring
methods and code. It is another just to use the tools written by others
to do computations that have little use. I can understand wanting to
learn how e.g. NFS and ECM work and the mathematics behind them.
I can understand wanting to push the art.

But blindly using code written by other very smart people to do mundane
computations does nothing to further either goal.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by fivemack

You are being held to higher standards than J Random Poster, and this is a compliment. If you were generally less terse than people would be less prone to assume you're being aggressively and insultingly terse.

Ah! Thank you for acknowledging that there is a double standard of
behavior in this forum. It explains much of the hypocricy.

[em99010pepe]

No one tells me what to run when I pay for my electricity bill. If I run for fun or whatever goal it is my problem, not yours. We don't need someone to tell us what we should run.
Personally I think all factoring projects are bullshit, we should be saving energy but most of us do it for fun.