Seventeen Or Bust

Seventeen Or Bust is a Distributed Computing project working on a problem in Number Theory called the Sierpinski Problem.

The aim of the project is to find primes of the form k * 2^n + 1, where k is one of the remaining 17 (now 6) candidates for Sierpinski numbers smaller than 78557, and n a positive integer. In order to find such a prime, we have a long queue of candidates, and we are running primality tests called PRP (PRobable Prime), which take a very long time, for every candidate in the queue. Because PRP takes so much computational power, we try to eliminate as many non-prime numbers as possible from the queue by Sieving, which means to take a (relatively) small integer and check whether it is a factor of one of the tests we are going to run. If there is a factor, the number is not prime and thus doesn't need to be tested. Finally, before running a particular test, one can make a last effort to find a factor for the particular k,n-pair in a few hours before running a test which will take several weeks. This is called Factoring.

Louie Helm lhelm@seventeenorbust.com

Louie Helm currently maintains the client code and has been maintaining public interest over the years. His focuses are primarily on the mathematics and the client design, as well as keeping in touch with project participants.

Louie supports research into artificial intelligence and rationality.

Michael Garrison sb@alienz.net

Mike is the Seventeen or Bust system administrator. He does an excellent job keeping the server alive. Before a generous donation allowed us to run the server at a data center, Mike maintained the machine at his house. This project would not be alive today without his gracious help.

Mike works full time for the University of Michigan and is still finishing up his CS degree at Eastern Michigan University.

David Norris danorris@seventeenorbust.com

David's work is much more of the behind-the-scenes type. He wrote much of the original system server code and all of the new server and interactive website code, including the statistics engine.

David works in a cube at an Army Corps of Engineers research lab in Illinois.

• Website: http://www.seventeenorbust.com/
• Join to team: Ukraine

• First seen on: April 1, 2002
• Date of completion: <font color="green"><strong>Project is Active</strong></font>

As of October 2007, Seventeen Or Bust has discovered ten huge prime numbers. The latest and largest discovery ranks as the seventh largest prime ever discovered, and it is the largest prime that is not a Mersenne Prime. Six of the ten primes rest in the Top 100.