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.
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