Hello,

I just looked around in the profiles of the top crunchers in PrimeGrid. I noticed some have thousands of factors found in the PPS sieve project.

I think for many people it would be more interesting if there are (difficult) badges for factors found, something like the "Primes Found" badges (counter badges). Of course there can't be a counter badge for thousands. But maybe a Bronze Badge for 10 factors, Silver for 20 and so on...

Have a nice day,
hope I can read some answers soon! :)

Finding a factor isn't the same as finding a prime. Want to find billions of factors easily? Do the initial sieving for a project. Just make sure you have LOTS of disk space.

Furthermore, we don't track factors the same way we track primes. A lot of the "factors found" actually remove candidates that were previously removed by earlier sieving tasks. The factors themselves aren't important. It's all about removing candidates.

Sieving is kind of the grunt work of the prime finding universe. No fame, no glory, just the satisfaction from getting the job done.

From a project standpoint, there's no way we'd ever create a badge like that. Different sieves produce factors at a different pace, and to have such a badge would definitely entice people to run one sieve instead of another. While we might prefer that you run sieve A instead of sieve B, we won't necessarily want people to be running the sieve that produces the most factors.

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My lucky number is 75898⁵²⁴²⁸⁸+1

While we might prefer that you run sieve A instead of sieve B, we won't necessarily want people to be running the sieve that produces the most factors.

While we might prefer that you run sieve A instead of sieve B, we won't necessarily want people to be running the sieve that produces the most factors.

The thing is, PPS SV is the only sieving subproject active, for now. So will subsequent sieves be added? (off-topic)

Finding factors during sieving is not the same as finding factors for numbers like F(12) 2^2^12 + 1 where it would be a major event (at least for certain types of people... ;)).

Finding a factor in sieving subprojects is comparable to doing a primality test and finding the number is composite. Nothing too special.


This made me wonder though, are those factors entered into FactorDB? Would they even be interested?
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Primes: 1281979 & 12+8+1979 & 1+2+8+1+9+7+9 & 1^2+2^2+8^2+1^2+9^2+7^2+9^2 & 12*8+19*79 & 12^8-1979 & 1281979 + 4 (cousin prime)

I thought so, on the other hand, they have factors of numbers like Mersenne or Fermat. So Cullen or Woodall could be interesting as well.

And I found entries for smaller primorials or factorials, for example for 15000!+1 one factor is known. So at least for the factorials and primorials the sieving results might have been interesting? On the other hand, it's always just one factor...
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Primes: 1281979 & 12+8+1979 & 1+2+8+1+9+7+9 & 1^2+2^2+8^2+1^2+9^2+7^2+9^2 & 12*8+19*79 & 12^8-1979 & 1281979 + 4 (cousin prime)