Hello all.
Let me introduce myself. I'm Lee Stephens, founder of Riesel Sieve. I'd like to thank SlangNRox and Brucifer for all the hardwork they have been doing at our humble little project. I'm very grateful to you guys for spreading the news about Riesel Sieve. I'll take a few moments to explain where we have been and where we are going.
Our project started out as a few friends reserving a 'k' from
www.prothsearch.net and trying to find a prime for the Riesel Problem. What we quickly noticed was 101 k's being sieved individually and one user would never hand off any kind of paper trail to the next. I decided that a talk with Mikael Klasson and Paul Jobling was in order to take the very new prothsieve.exe and turn it from the Seventeen Or Bust version which was just about 13 k's at the time and numbers in the form of k*2^n+1, and turn it into a monster sieve that could rip thru 101 k's in the form of k*2^n-1. The first client to come out was Paul Joblings code of merely doing NewPGen and making it work on multiple k's and was called Rieselsieve.exe...hence the name of our project. Later Mikael Klasson converted his Prothsieve.exe to handle numbers of our form and we've been tweaking that client ever since.
Originally, I sieved 101 k values by myself from 2 to 1 billion individually for each k. I then took these 101 files and combined them and edited them to fit into Riesel.dat. Riesel.dat is the data input file for Prothsieve.exe. I then sieved all 101 k values myself from 1 billion to 10 billion. At this point I started a PHPBB2 forum and asked my friends to help me with sieving. Everyone grab a range and see if we can remove a lot of numbers. We offered our sieved numbers to the rest of the community. Those people on the
www.prothsearch.net website who had a 'k' reserved in their name. As people 'gave up' or 'abandoned' their k reserves and moved on to other projects, I reserved the k values in my name at first and then under Riesel Sieve later on.
We individually, co-ordinated via forum posts and IRC only, started to work using the original LLR.exe and tried to find primes. Late in 2003 we found 261221*2^689422-1 to be prime. In 2004 we found 14 more primes and excelerated the completion date of solving the Riesel Problem. Our Primes are as follows:
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rank description digits who year comment
----- -------------------------------- ------- ---- ---- --------------
20 192089*2^1395688-1 420150 L49 2004
46 502541*2^1199930-1 361221 L93 2004
49 71009*2^1185112-1 356760 L47 2004
54 350107*2^1144101-1 344415 L35 2004
56 500621*2^1138518-1 342734 L73 2004
57 504613*2^1136459-1 342114 L84 2004
60 412717*2^1084409-1 326446 L76 2004
61 150847*2^1076441-1 324047 L73 2004
78 309817*2^901173-1 271286 L64 2004
80 170591*2^866870-1 260960 L47 2004
81 93997*2^864401-1 260216 L49 2004
102 460139*2^779536-1 234670 L47 2004
104 246299*2^752600-1 226561 L42 2004
136 261221*2^689422-1 207543 L35 2003
184 279703*2^616235-1 185511 L53 2004
----- -------------------------------- ------- ---- ---- --------------
Early in 2004 we created LLRNET. LLRNET is the core of LLR on with a LUA wrapper to make it a network client. The client and server are the same code. So if you have the client...then you have the server. Only a command line switch and config file are needed. We encourage people to use a server themselves for a proxy server on their LAN. One word of note though....currently the server in proxy mode strips out the Userid and sends as the ServerUserid.
Our next version of LLRNET will by tied to MySQL as to help us automate stats and create what we hope to be the most extensive stats of any Primes based project and both informative and fun.
Someone mentioned documentation. This area of our project is woefully pitiful. I know we need to document everything in an easy and quickly informative way. Unfortunantly I get tied up in the other parts of the project and ignore the issues that are my weakness. I may like to write 500 page forum posts but I detest writing how-to's and instructions. I will make a promise to get someone working on this issue as soon as possible though.
My biggest concern at the moment is building PHP pages for user registration, personal stats pages, personal admin pages, and tying all that in with the client/server. If anyone has experience with building professional looking windows installers that can install the client and register new users...please feel free to contact me.
Our goals for this year are to find no less than 20 new primes. At first our primes will be Top 50 primes and as we move thru the ranges we will end the year with most likely our first Top 10 prime number. Finding primes in the millions of decimal digits will be common for us next year. With our project, we have formulas for knowing...well educated guessing...how many primes we will hit, where and when. This being said, our project WILL have results. We will hit primes and each one will be bigger than the last. We will have a long way to go to find 81 primes and prove the Riesel Problem, but each year we will bring that goal closer and closer.
Thanks to all that have read this far. I hope to see each and every one of you involved in our project. May you join, may you find primes. If anyone has any questions at all. Please feel free to drop by the forums on
www.rieselsieve.com or stop by IRC irc.freenode.net #rieselsieve and ask me or one of the staff questions about our project.
Lee Stephens
B2
Riesel Sieve
