You just might be addicted to GIMPS if...

[sonjohan]

... You howl in fury because it took you 1 week to have Prime95 use your new Dual-core's CPU's for 100%.
... You howl in fury because when you check the Task Manager, you notice that the second instance of Prime95 is still behind System Idle Process in CPU time.

[Edit] Guilty on both charges.

[Mini-Geek]

...you find that the optimal number of moves for Towers of Hanoi is 2^n-1 where n is the number of disks, and become nearly as obsessed with Towers of Hanoi as with GIMPS itself.

...you only play Towers of Hanoi with a number of disks that makes the optimal number of moves a Mersenne prime.

...you read what I just said and begin playing Towers of Hanoi with 32,582,657 disks...even though it will take so long that the digits of the number of seconds is 9.8 million.

...you read the above and calculate (based on your age and life expectancy, taking into account needing to sleep and check the mersenne forum, assuming 1 second per move) the largest Mersenne prime that you can finish in your life.

...you calculate that, and are extremely disappointed that it will only take you a week, so you just start on the next biggest one anyway and put it in your will for your child to finish it after you die, and make him/her put in his/her will to have their child finish it after them if they don't finish it before they die, and so on. (or: you don't have any kids, so you adopt one just for this purpose and put it in your will for him/her to finish it)

...you're happy that you now have something to keep you occupied, since now your 486 you use to read the mersenne forum is available more often to crunch numbers for GIMPS.

note: the optimal number of moves for n disks is 2^n-1

I admit it, these (except the second and last ones) are more like "You definitely are so obsessed with Mersenne primes that it spills over into everything in your life if..." than "You just might be addicted to GIMPS if..."

Not guilty on any of those, by the way.

[ixfd64]

You watch the film The Number 23 and become excited because 23 is prime. -- guilty --

[jinydu]

... you suffer neverending nightmares after hearing this horror story (even though you would of course never let anyone else use your computer anyway, since it slows down Prime95):

Originally Posted by petrw1

My first GIMPS PC was a PII 400Mhz ... it ran for 15 months on M33xxxxxx and last reported in at 99.8% complete before my son ran something that swallowed up every bit of memory in an instant. The PC crashed so quickly that when I powered down and up again Prime95 determined it had to start from the beginning.

[davieddy]

You compile a clear table which epitomizes
concisely how GIMPS has been getting on during
the last 10 months.

(THX petrw1)

David

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by sonjohan

... You howl in fury because it took you 1 week to have Prime95 use your new Dual-core's CPU's for 100%.
... You howl in fury because when you check the Task Manager, you notice that the second instance of Prime95 is still behind System Idle Process in CPU time.

[Edit] Guilty on both charges.

In a different thread I dared to suggest that
fully exploiting multicore PCs was not without its
problems.
When challenged as to what I meant, I simply
replied "numerous posts to that effect".
This IMHO is one such

David

[Mini-Geek]

...if you read the link at http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpos...&postcount=323 and cry because of all that CPU time being wasted on something like checkers. (not guilty)

[petrw1]

You pull over in the middle of a boulevard to take this picture:

[Mini-Geek]

Originally Posted by petrw1

You pull over in the middle of a boulevard to take this picture:

What's so special about 244497 or 2444971? Neither are primes, so obviously are not Mersenne primes or a Mersenne number you're working on.

[Jens K Andersen]

Originally Posted by Mini-Geek

What's so special about 244497 or 2444971? Neither are primes, so obviously are not Mersenne primes

2^44497-1

[jinydu]

(for Team Prime Rib members)

... of course you knew months ago that TPR would soon pass 100K LL Primenet CPU years and devised a plan. A few days ago, you stopped one of your first time LL tests just 1 iteration before it was to finish (you practiced the skill of doing this for hours, expecting that you couldn't afford to stop even 2 iterations from the finish, since there would be plenty of other people as determined as you). You refreshed the TPR individual account report page continually for the last 24 hours, without breaking for food or sleep or anything else, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Then, within 1 second of TPR reaching 99,999.2 CPU years, you resumed the test, thereby claiming the distinction of completing the milestone test that pushed TPR above 100K CPU years.