Deleted posts...

[gd_barnes]

If I'm out of line here, the admin of this forum should properly chastise me and tell me where else I should have posted this thread. Or if it can be moved elsewhere, please do.

What will be following is an entire exchange of several posts that Anonymous, VBCurtis, em99010pepe, Kosmaj and I had at RPS and we are feuding over "No Prime Left Behind" (NPLB) reservation of some k's<300. Kosmaj has resorted to deleting 5 of mine and not responding directly.

NPLB was kind enough to mention that we are going to search the k's to avoid double-effort between our project and the RPS project only to be met with a huge amount of wrath.

What I want brought up openly and publically is that Kosmaj has deleted 5 of my posts for no reason and closed the thead and resorted to calling me names. This after I made an offer to help their project and work with them to no avail.By posting all related posts here, everyone will see both sides of the exchange.

Give me about 10 mins. after this post to post the entire exchange.

Any comments both pro and con are welcome.


Gary

[gd_barnes]

Post 1 of the exchange by Anonymous here:

Hi all,

As part of a new effort to help push forward a number of k<300 that are significantly "behind" their neighbors as far as testing level is concerned, the No Prime Left Behind project is reserving the following currently unreserved k's, all searched to n=600K except k=289:

65, 115, 149, 175, 179, 185, 199, 215, 227, 229, 239, 241, 257, 265, 271, 289, 293

With the exception of k=289, which we will be reserving for the range of n=520K-1M, all of the above k's are reserved for the range of n=600K-1M.

We will be starting a public team sieve for these k's within the next week or two, and plan to start an LLR team drive when that is concluded, so if any of you guys want to help search these k's, feel free to come on over!

Anon

[gd_barnes]

Post 2 of the exchange by Kosmaj here:

Prime Search has never searched k<250, and since several years ago they haven't searched k<300 either (with exception of Griffin at k=255). On the other hand RPS, and 15k before, have been committed to k<300 from the beginning. We've searched some Ks from as low as n=20k.

In other words, your reservation makes no sense! You have your 300 < k < 1000, 350 of them, that's more than enough.

And Ks at 600k are not "behind" for prime search in general. Some k<100 of the k*2^n+1 form are still not completely tested below 500k!

[gd_barnes]

Post 3 of the exchange by VBCurtis here:

Anon-
I assume this means you will credit RPS as the project, not primesearch?

What is the reasoning to start another team drive when we have a drive on k's of very similar size already sieved yet untested at the levels you are aiming at?
RPS has a history of having some k's tested as team drives, others left open to reservation for individual testers. We have many files already sieved in the 600k to 1M range, yet many longtime RPS members like to sieve for themselves. If your main goal is to get as many k's to 1M as possible, test the Masser files, or the 6th drive. We don't need more sieving done right now, but we do like having individual k's available at a level where an individual with 1-3 machines can make useful progress on his/her own. If you take all remaining k's currently under 1M, that opportunity is lost to the extent that megabits are MUCH slower for individuals with few machines to make progress on. This is exactly the reason I left these k's out of the 6th drive- I could have sieved all of them, but we like the idea of leaving some for individual reservations.
There is efficiency in sieving many k's all at once, but a yet greater efficiency in sieving a large range of n all at once. If you do go ahead with a k<300 search, please consider honoring our wishes to leave some k's for individual RPS members; you can compensate for this by taking fewer k's higher than 1M- high enough to make a project of similar length, and likely with a more efficient sieve.

Please explain how you conclude these k's are "behind". I'm interested in the thought process, why you are choosing RPS k's instead of some other smaller unsearched candidates (proths under 300? Riesels in 1000-2000? etc). The top-5000 cutoff is ~400k, I think; primes that take twice as long to test as the cutoff prime don't seem behind to me, particularly when there are quite a few k's in 300-400 also only tested to 600k-- and you already have those sieved to 1M!

I suspect by the time you test 300-400 to 1M, many of these k's under 300 would be reserved and advanced toward 1M, if not higher. With so much already sieved and ready to test both in RPS and NPLB, I hope you will reconsider your effort, which removes the opportunity for individuals to run individual k's start-to-finish with their own sieving effort. Review AES's entry into RPS and reservations for an example of a recent individual tester- he has both team participation and his own k's.

-Curtis

[gd_barnes]

Post 4 of the exchange by em99010pepe here:

My concern here is the excess of work to be tested on such limited CPU power.

[gd_barnes]

Post 5 of the exchange by Anonymous here:

Kosmaj and Curtis,

First of all, why is it at all odd that we are reserving these k's? After all, we'd hardly be the first project to reserve k<300's for themselves, and no stink was ever made about them. (In fact, if memory serves, I think when RPS was first started, it was publicly stated that they by no means held the sole rights to k<300 and that other projects were welcome to the unreserved k's. I can also think of numerous k<300 right off the top of my head that are reserved by other projects--k=1, 3, 27, 121, etc.)

Conversely, if anyone at RPS wishes to reserve any of NPLB's 300<k<1001 k's, they are more than welcome to reserve and search there. They can even report primes as RPS if they'd like--all we ask is that if they wish to use a sieve file provided by NPLB, they report as PrimeSearch, otherwise they're welcome to report however they like. The reverse is also true: currently I am doing some k=5 work that I got from Curtis, and because the sieve file is from RPS, any primes that I may find from that file will be reported as fully and unequivocably RPS.

As for why I feel that these specific k<300 are "behind" where they should be, that is because NPLB is estimating that they'll reach n=600K on all of 300<k<1001 no later than the end of this year, and as soon as we reach that point we'll continue right on up past 600K--thus, does it make sense that with 300<k<1001 going past 600K, some k<300 are still sitting around at 600K?

The way I see it, it's not a qusestion of NPLB having "enough" k's already, but instead a question of which k's have been neglected in searching and really should be higher, based on comparisons both with higher k's and with the +1 side. NPLB's mission is to tackle the k's and k-ranges that have not been searched contiguously and accurately to a high enough level, and bring them up to where they should be--regardless of whether it's 300<k<1001, k<300, or 1003<k<2000 (a range that we plan to do in the future).

After all, what's the use of all this prime searching if it's not going to be done in an orderly and reasonably contiguous manner? Last I heard, the main reason why this stuff has any use is to hopefully gather enough data that will show patterns to eventually help us crack the secret of where prime numbers reside on the number line. And in order to get meaningful patterns, you have to have things searched contiguously, and you also have to have neighboring k's all searched up to at least roughly the same amount.

Besides, why's anyone complaining? All we're doing is picking up a bunch of unreserved k's that nobody's shown any interest in for quite a while, and pushing up their testing level for you guys. And I'm pretty sure we'll manage to search them a lot faster than they would have been searched had they just sat around here until someone eventually reserved them, one by one. What's there to complain about?

Anon

[gd_barnes]

Post 6 of the exchange by ME.

This is the FIRST post that was deleted by Kosmaj. Why? I can't say.

Hum. I was surprised by the response to Anon's reservation for NPLB. I was surprised because people like Jeffrey who are not associated with RPS have reserved multiple k’s and not reported primes as RPS. So we didn’t feel it would be a big deal.

RPS and NPLB have an opposite way of searching for primes. RPS allows much flexibility in individual-k reservations and does less team efforts. NPLB prefers to have large team efforts while allowing some individual-k reservations. Neither is right or wrong. They're just different. We've reserved the k's because it appears that everyone at RPS is maxed out on the k's they're searching and most of the k's had not been searched in nearly 2 years. Also, many other people at RPS seem interested in searching k>1001. So most of the k's would likely sit at n=600K for quite some time.

I thought I'd offer up some explanations to ease people's concerns about NPLB's reservation here:

1. In the past, RPS has previously searched k=300-1001 and reported primes as RPS. So there is clearly precedence in this reservation. Also, Jeffrey, who is not associated with RPS, previously reserved and search 5-6 k's and didn't report them as RPS. Rob and others not associated with RPS have done the same. The only projects that own k's are GIMPS, 321, 2721, and 12121. In other words, all projects besides these don't own k's, they just coordinate searching efforts for ranges of k, ranges of n, or some other manner that suits their particular project.

2. NPLB has well more than enough resources for this. I have 10 quads myself. If I put 4 quads on this effort 24x7, I could finish it in < 1 year. I don't plan to do so. Likely I'll put 1-2 quads on it and many of our faithful searchers will assist with it. 3 of those searchers have large resources: Bruce, Lennart, and Beyond. At the moment, NPLB is in a serious sieving mode and some people have idled their machines for the summer so the drives have progressed more slowly than usual. Regardless, I noticed that NPLB still increased it’s top-5000 score faster than RPS for almost 2 months up until the last month when you guys found some large primes for n>1M such that we could not keep up.

3. RPS had plenty of time to reserve these k's. All except 2-3 of them went nearly 2 years without being touched. The other 2-3 were nearing 1 year. If something lies dormant long enough, someone or another project is bound to pick it up.

4. People at RPS are more than welcome to reserve k=300-1001, search them, and report them as RPS. They just have to stay ahead of our drives. This shouldn't be a big deal.


As a gesture of goodwill: I’d like to offer the following: I’ll search an n=10K range of your 6th drive and of course report any primes as RPS. I’ll put a quad on it starting next Thursday so it should be done fairly quickly.


Gary

[gd_barnes]

Now at this point, as you know, Kosmaj deleted the above post. Upon seeing the deletion, I reposted the exact same words in the above post but added the below 4-5 paras.

Take the above post and add the following wording to it to get what I reposted:

Now to the part that is kind of sad but it has to be stated publicly now because it's happened twice:

Kosmaj is deleting my posts that are only explanatory or good-natured if he doesn’t agree with them. He's now deleted 2 of them recently, one here that was very similar to this one from about 6 hours ago (minus these last 2-3 paragraphs) and one in the k=17 thread from about 2 days ago where I made a light-hearted joke about the range that is being ‘secretly’ searched by 'RPS' as being searched by some high political figure. I'm sure there will be some people that will read this before he deletes it again.

Kosmaj, I will continue to post this and you can continue to delete it so suit yourself because I'm saving it off this time and will post it again within a few hours (or mins.) if you delete it again. You can't be on 24 hours a day and eventually everyone else will see my post. They will see the cat-and-mouse game and will wonder why you can't respond to it or simply ignore it like most admins would if they don't agree with something.

You can complain to Xyzzy if you want but I'm not attacking anyone. I’m only explaining things and making a kind gesture so good luck with that.

I've even made the kind offer of searching your 6th drive as a gesture of goodwill and reporting primes as RPS yet you deleted my post? Why? So people don't see the offer of goodwill that I made? Probably so.

My offer of searching your 6th drive still stands. If you choose to delete my post again, that offer will still stand because this exact same post will be reposted.


Gary

[gd_barnes]

At this point, Carlos (em99010pepe) stepped in and, without any request from me, reposted my entire post. He must have seen what happened and saved if off.

I just wanted to take this moment to thank Carlos publicly for the kind gesture!

Of course in stepped Kosmaj and deleted Carlos's repost of my post and responded with the name calling:

Post 7 of the exchange by Kosmaj here:

To Gary,

Only jerks keep on posting their worthless messages.
It's up to you to show who you are.

[em99010pepe]

Kosmaj is showing an arrogant attitude towards Gary and Anon comments deleting their posts like he wants to hide something. We are here to find primes and not to fight each other. Now I understand why Benson is searching for primes k<300 without giving a s*** to Kosmaj, he is doing the right thing.

Carlos

[gd_barnes]

Post 8 of the exchange by me.

This is the SECOND post deleted by Kosmaj:

And it takes a really big man to call someone a jerk and not respond to the points in a worthwhile post or simply ignore it if he doesn't agree with it. I guess the post wasn't so worthless since someone I didn't even ask to repost it did so.

Be a man and respond like a man would. The post was innocuous enough to begin with so why not just ignore it? Now it's made you look quite silly because now people publicly know that you delete posts without informing anyone including the person who wrote them.

There are now 3 of us who will continue to repost the post if you delete it so give it up dude. You're out-numbered.

I've saved this one off too. If you delete it, I and perhaps others will repost it also. You can no longer hide behind having the power of an admin and being able to delete posts. As a matter of fact, I think I'll save off any post that I post here in the future and repost it if it gets deleted.

I guess this means you don't want me to help you with your 6th drive.

Gary