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:
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:
- 28433(27830457) + 1 with
2,357,207 decimal digits, discovered December 30, 2004.
Crunched by a member of Team Prime Rib.
-
5359(25054502)
+ 1 with 1,521,561 decimal digits, discovered
December 6, 2003. Crunched by Randy
Sundquist.
-
54767(21337287)
+ 1 with 402,569 decimal digits, discovered
December 23, 2002. Crunched by Peter
Coels.
-
69109(21157446)
+ 1 with 348,431 decimal digits, discovered
December 6, 2002. Crunched by Sean
DiMichele.
-
44131(2995972)
+ 1 with 299,823 decimal digits, discovered
December 5, 2002. Crunched by an
anonymous participant.
-
65567(21013803)
+ 1 with 305,190 decimal digits, discovered
December 2, 2002. Crunched by James
Burt.
-
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!
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