Quote from: Dies diem docet on Today at 04:08:46 PM

It would be good to have confirmed prime gaps.

I haven't encountered any disputes about the accepted standards of inclusion.

The original creator and maintainer of the prime gap list, the late Dr T.R.Nicely, published the source code of the cglp program that he created and used to verify the inclusion of a first known occurrence prime gap to the prime gap list:

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“I have made available for download the zipfile cglp4.zip, featuring a DOS/Wintel executable which will check gap listings for validity, using probabilistic primality tests of extremely high reliability. Included are sample input and output files, source code (GNU C with GMP), and support routines. I strongly recommend the use of this code to check your listings prior to submission.”

After Dr. Nicely's death, I worked with the intellectual inheritors of his legacy, the Mersenne Forum's Prime Gap Search group to preserve the cglp source code and the curation of the prime gap list so that the probity of the list was maintained and I used a Linux compilation of cglp to check any subsequently-submitted Gapcoin records. Subsequent to that, Seth Troisi of the PGS group has created an online checker (implemented in Go, I infer from the URL) which “we” (and by that, I mean me) and the PGS are now using to curate the prime gap list.

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Gapcoin has a very limited range to work with and other groups have improved their algos. The pow is limiting what range and how it's done., Frey did a good work to create this coin but it needs some improvements.

I'm not sure how much leeway there is for improvement of the Proof-of-Work function without compromising the cryptocurrency aspects of Gapcoin. j0nn9 was hoping that other people might have some ideas on how to improve the miner, if you have some specific improvements in mind, please share them.

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Mersenne group finds new nice gaps in a day and we do the same in a month. I changed to search in p88 for a record and so far I just have found one 25+ merit gap. To find a 30+ gap is hard.

That's primarily because the Gapcoin community has shrunk - difficulty approximates merit and difficulty is a dependent variable of hash rate - within limits, the lower the hash rate, the lower the difficulty, the lower the merit of gaps accepted as valid Proof-of-Work solutions.

It's obvious from the charts; interest, hash rate and difficulty spiked a couple of months after launch (diff at 25) and then steadily declined during the first half of 2015 until around six months after the launch when it stabilized at a much¹ lower level (diff=20/21) - about the same time of the developer's last substantive post to the thread.

It's worth not losing sight of the fact that the world record merit held by Gapcoin is for a block mined with a modest shift of 32. For all the extensive range of prime digit lengths covered by prime gap searchers, it transpires that intensive examination of a narrow range of prime digit lengths has revealed a prime gap of world record merit.

¹ "much" because Gapcoin difficulty increases/decreases logarithmically.

Cheers

Graham