Simon Plouffe was wondering that some people are calculating pi by using imperfect algorithms. Here is an example of some people doing factoring by using imperfect algorithms. Helger ----------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 13:00:30 +0200 (EET) From: Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen <mjos@tcs.hut.fi> To: Phil Carmody <fatphil@asdf.org> Cc: Helger Lipmaa <helger@tcs.hut.fi>, Johan Wallen <johan@tcs.hut.fi> Subject: 2000+ complete idiots doing factoring Hi, This is from "The Neo Project", http://www.theneoproject.com, which recently got to the news: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-979301.html They've got a lot of people working on this: LIVE RSA-576 Project Statistics Live: Tuesday January 07, 2003 05:39:28 EST (GMT -5) Total Users: 2,069 Total Nodes: 6,457 Total Teams: 1648 Total Packets Complete: 36,878,155 Total Keys Checked: .14633251904E+15 Total CPU Years: 160.3000 Now.. the good bit. Check out their method (from the FAQ's [sic]): How are we going to crack the RSA 576 challenge? [..] You can basically get a bunch of computers together and start sieving, but that could take months, years, decades, even centuries. So we decided to take the random approach. We do this by to generating a random number less than or equal to the square root of the challenge number and add 1 digit until its a possible prime number, as per Miller's Primality Test (while keeping the number the same length as the square root of the challenge) and see if the challenge number is evenly divisible by the "altered" randomly generated number. If it is... it is figured out. We are looking in to incorporating a few known methods, but keeping it a little random! Cheers, - mjos Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen <mjos@tcs.hut.fi> Helsinki University of Technology