Seventeen or Bust is a distributed computing project aimed at solving the Sierpinski problem. With the aid of several thousand computers, run by public participants around the world, Seventeen or Bust is searching for primes in sequences of the form k(2ⁿ) + 1, for fixed k. Our goal is to exhibit primes for the remaining candidates k < 78,557, and thereby prove that k = 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number.

The project was conceived in March of 2002 by two college undergraduates. After some planning and a lot of programming, the first public client was released on April 1. The project is now administered by:

• Louis Helm, a computer engineer in Austin, Texas.
• David Norris, a software engineer in Urbana, Illinois.
• Michael Garrison, a Computer Science undergraduate at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The project's number crunching core is contributed by George Woltman of GIMPS. Countless others have made contributions in the form of time, code and logistics.

The name of the project is due to the fact that, when founded, there were seventeen values of k for which no primes were known. As of January of 2005, Seventeen or Bust has eliminated seven of those seventeen candidates. The project might now be styled "Ten or Bust," but the original name will be kept for consistency.

Seventeen or Bust's seven prime discoveries are:

7. 28433(2^7830457) + 1 with 2,357,207 decimal digits, discovered December 30, 2004. Crunched by a member of Team Prime Rib.
6. 5359(2^5054502) + 1 with 1,521,561 decimal digits, discovered December 6, 2003. Crunched by Randy Sundquist.
5. 54767(2^1337287) + 1 with 402,569 decimal digits, discovered December 23, 2002. Crunched by Peter Coels.
4. 69109(2^1157446) + 1 with 348,431 decimal digits, discovered December 6, 2002. Crunched by Sean DiMichele.
3. 44131(2⁹⁹⁵⁹⁷²) + 1 with 299,823 decimal digits, discovered December 5, 2002. Crunched by an anonymous participant.
2. 65567(2^1013803) + 1 with 305,190 decimal digits, discovered December 2, 2002. Crunched by James Burt.
1. 46157(2⁶⁹⁸²⁰⁷) + 1 with 210,186 decimal digits, discovered November 27, 2002. Crunched by Stephen Gibson.

You can help this project by downloading our client software and letting your computer crunch numbers in its spare time!