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#51

Prime Crunch / Re: Project Update

Last post by Dingo - September 12, 2026, 11:41:37 PM

QuoteWhat shipped this week (week 36)
andy
andy
6 days ago
edited
0
A round up of what has changed on the site this week.

Work ranges

A k can give itself back. Every row on your work ranges page now has a "release k" switch. With it on, the k is unreserved once there is nothing left to test in that window, and the rows on it go with it.

Until now a reservation ended two ways: you unreserved it, or the inactivity clock took it, which is a warning after seven days without work and a release a day after that. Neither helps if you finish the window you set out to search and carry on crunching elsewhere. That is the case where holding a k costs other searchers and nobody notices.

A check every five minutes reads the same counts the "finished" chip on the row draws: nothing ready, nothing out with a machine, and candidates actually in the window. The release goes through the same path as pressing Unreserve yourself, so jobs are cancelled exactly as they always were, and you get an account notice. If you hold one k in two windows it only goes back when both are done, in whatever order they finish. Turning the switch on asks for confirmation and counts the other rows on that k the release would take with it. Turning it off does not, because that only means the k stays where it is.

Thanks to @Carlos, who asked for this in Release a k automatically.

Tiers. @Dingo and @PDW both reported that "New tier" on the row menu did nothing. The button was not broken, it was misnamed. It split a row out of a tier it shared with others, so with one row in one tier there was nothing to split, and the click sent no request and produced no error. It is now "Split into own tier" and greys out where there is no tie to split, like every other item in that menu.

What they were both actually after now exists: "Duplicate into a new tier", beside "Duplicate in this tier". A row added by either scrolls into view and is tinted for a couple of seconds, since a new row lands at the bottom of the plan and a copy looks identical to the row it came from.

The density bar shows more of the range. It had 30 marks spread across the whole loaded ceiling of about 12,000,000, so each mark covered 400,000 n and a window of 1 to 499,999 was a sliver about one mark wide at the far left. There are now 240 marks at 50,000 n each, so the same window covers ten of them.

The limit here is pixels rather than data. The bar is roughly 370 CSS pixels wide. One mark per grid cell, which is what the data would support, puts each at 0.3px, and at that size a single tested cell can vanish on rounding.

The page updates itself when a range finishes, rather than waiting for a reload.

Jobs

A page for queued work, at Jobs, Queued. This is work allocated to your machines that no worker has picked up. The Jobs page has only ever listed jobs that reported progress, so this work appeared nowhere and there was no way to get the id needed to cancel it. It came out of two jobs @Carlos emailed about, which he could not have cancelled himself however hard he looked.

Most of what shows up here is an ordinary client queue and not a problem. The page does not try to tell a queue from a loss, because it cannot: it gives you how long each number has been sitting and the date the seven day sweep returns it to the pool, and you know whether that machine is working. Cancelling is a page at a time instead of one confirmation per number.

One detail. Below n = 20,000 the client reports no progress at all, so down there queued cannot be told from running. Those numbers are listed only once they are more than six hours old, which no queue at that size survives.

Primes

Verifications publish as they land. A new prime used to be held off the public pages until published by hand whenever it was large enough to rank. Size is only half the question. The hold exists to protect a submission, and confirming a prime somebody else found years ago has no submission to protect and nothing to reveal, since the source published it long ago. The hold now applies only to a discovery of ours. A verification is on the site as soon as it is stored.

Discoverer and verifier are named separately. Three places credited one person for a prime two people had a hand in.

The top primes chart plotted every point on the date our machine finished, so a prime found in 2014 and confirmed here last month was drawn as a 2026 find. A verification now sits on the date the public record gives, and the tooltip carries separate "discovered by" and "verified by" lines. Points are coloured by whose result it is rather than by k, and the legend doubles as a filter.
The prime families grid said "Found by" and one name on every chip, whether that chip was a discovery or a re-test. It names both parties now.
Profiles list "Largest discoveries" rather than largest primes, and the T5K figure counts discoveries. Verifications are somebody else's finds, and they were taking the top of the card because they are usually the larger numbers.
Where neither side can be shown to have been first, because our timestamp falls inside the period the published date leaves open, all three still say "found by" and leave it at that.

A new page

Territory maps the ground the project has finished: one mark per completed 500k range cell, coloured by whoever did the testing. As I write this that is 563 cells across 330 values of k and fifteen people. The shape is a staircase rather than a front, because low exponents are cheap and every band up costs more per test. One cell sits above 7.5M.

It makes no claim about anyone outside primecrunch. A gap means we have not completed a range there, not that nobody has. Some/many of those k already have known primes found by others.