Are the recent advancements for GIMPS (VDF, Gerbicz check, Jacobi check) worth publishing?

[jwnutter]

Originally Posted by preda

Anyway, publishing may help with awareness of the project.

Couldn't agree more. I was not aware of the project until I saw it mentioned (somewhat as an aside as I recall) in a ~2018 WSJ article. From that point, it took me several months to learn enough about the project to determine that I was interested in contributing. As another example, my brother - who has used Prime95 to stress test various PC builds for many years - was not aware of the underlying distributed computing project but was very familiar with the software.

Originally Posted by kriesel

We should write our history up as it happens while people are still available and clear headed to ensure accuracy.

Agree. And, I think it will be important to write for at least two different audiences - the scientific community (for validation/verification of all the great work that many many folks have contributed to this project) and the layperson (who, like me, is interested in learning about the project but does not currently have the background necessary to follow all the information contained in this forum). I believe that the bulk of future computing resources volunteered to this project will come from the latter group, which is why I believe this to be an important audience.

Originally Posted by chalsall

The point being...

Perhaps this is worth formally writing up.

We have a lot of talent here, which could be brought to bear.

No need to compare how large or small our numbers are. Simply, who can (and is willing) to help?

Agree, and I'm willing to help. However, I would put myself in audience 2 discussed above. Having a willingness to help and the ability are two very different things in my book.

Originally Posted by chalsall

I think that would be quite valuable.

It would be a peer-reviewed (and, technically, published (although not "Published")) collection of all the very interesting things various people do here. And, importantly, when each step happened.

I often point to this Forum as a great example of what online collaboration can do.

This is certainly a great example of online collaboration. In all honesty, like none I've ever seen before. Kudos to all you guys/gals that make this project a success. From an end-user perspective, I make a few selection and hit "Go", but I know there's a lot of amazing work going on behind the scenes, which (to me anyway) is why this forum is so interesting to follow.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by jwnutter

Agree. And, I think it will be important to write for at least two different audiences - the scientific community (for validation/verification of all the great work that many many folks have contributed to this project) and the layperson (who, like me, is interested in learning about the project but does not currently have the background necessary to follow all the information contained in this forum).

Absolutely. "Be responsible for the listening into which you are speaking." was a very insightful thing a friend of mine told me once.

Originally Posted by jwnutter

I believe that the bulk of future computing resources volunteered to this project will come from the latter group, which is why I believe this to be an important audience.

Again, I agree. A bit of work writing "public interest" articles, and then shopping them around, could generate a lot of interest in the project. To date we've only really relied on the PR done during the announcement of the next MP find.

Originally Posted by jwnutter

Agree, and I'm willing to help. However, I would put myself in audience 2 discussed above. Having a willingness to help and the ability are two very different things in my book.

This is very much an "Open Source Shop". Heck, just look at the copyright notice at the bottom of every page on this Forum.

Documentation is a form of programming too (just, for humans)...

P.S. Or, even, just proof-reading. I've helped with some language over the years, and have gratefully received such assistance from others here as well.

P.P.S. Human is *hard*!!!

[kriesel]

Global collaboration at internet speed is what http:// was originally designed for, at CERN.
It's taken a while to get to the point where it is as efficient as this. Many scientific research collaborations are using similar to what we in GIMPS are; private messaging, email, shared forums, web-facing databases, with authentication, document uploads to the central shared repository, keyword searches, etc. As some of our participants are familiar with, by participation in those projects also.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I think that we should wait a bit for George, Mihai, et al of those that were most deeply involved to consider this. Then, there should be a separate thread for this.

My thinking too. People who had no contribution or barely understand the math, or even were skeptical/against in the beginning (like myself) should keep quiet...

[R. Gerbicz]

Originally Posted by preda

Other candidates for inclusion:

1. Robert presents a great simple trick that has the potential to reduce the cost of P-1 first-stage by a factor of around 10x when ran in conjunction with PRP (improving from my trivial idea offering a 2x gain):
https://mersenneforum.org/showpost.p...6&postcount=14
(I'm currently working on implementing this)

2. PRP-1,
an original idea that came to a dead-end. Dead-end or not, in time I did gain an improved understanding of its behavior and the trade-offs involved, which may be interesting to share.

Originally Posted by preda

And George's design of super-precision fast sin/cos primitives in the FFT context may be of interest, with help from Ernst who contributed the initial optimizer based on Chebyshev polinomials IIRC. IMO such work is worthy to be integrated in math libraries (such as the ones offered by AMD and I imagine by Nvidia for GPUs), and proposes a new API for trigonometrics that allows to extract the increased precision.

Another great success was the PRP CF proof idea from me. It could be a joint paper, but I've not a lot of time for it, maybe I could start and finish it this year. Mathematics of Computation would be the best publisher (though the bar is pretty high there).
About vdf proof, there is "almost" no work here I mean they have already published two papers about it; but you can write a few pages about the implementation parts/ideas for it and ofcourse the algorithm.
And write about the mentioned "super-precision fast sin/cos primitives in the FFT context".
Anyway my part would be the longest.
Describing the Jacobi check would be easiest, if the original discoverer wants his real name to be published then send a pm me or George. [including your name].