Hello everybody,
We have just passed two months of computation and have already found
50% of the initially estimated number of distinguished points! The
number of people participating is still increasing (about 1300 so far)
and nearly 6000 machines have sent in some distinguished points.
Due to the way the birthday paradox works, our chance of success was
very low at first but is now increasing rapidly. At the moment it
looks like we have about 1 chance in 2 of solving Certicom's problem
in one more month.
Our software appears to be working fine. No serious bugs have cropped
up. We run tests on the distinguished points arriving here and almost
all are correct. A few need manual fixing (due to mailers having put
a line break in the middle of a hex number, for instance).
All in all, this project is ticking along very nicely indeed. It is
already the biggest elliptic curve calculation ever, by a long shot!
It is highly likely that will soon succeed and be able to donate a
chunk of cash to support the most popular HTTP server on the Internet,
Apache, and related open-source software projects.
Thank you all for participating and good luck in finding the matching points!
Rob.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 02 2000 - 22:12:03 MET