Yoyo: ECM: end year report for GCW numbers

The GCW tables and associated information have just been posted. There is a brand new progress file for 2013q1 which contains a grand total of zero entries. Many people have contributed to the 532 factors discovered in 2012, mostly individuals but the yoyo@home, RSALS and NFS@home collaborations have also done valuable work. My thanks to all of these and, of course, to those who contributed ECM effort but have not yet been successful. More on that below. Since the project went public in September 2000, over twenty thousand factors have been discovered and very nearly ten thousand complete factorizations have been found. Only ten composites under 150 digits remain to be factored. There are only four composites remaining with SNFS difficulty under 210 digits and one of those is currently 50% sieved. In the light of this progress, the snfs.txt file has now been extended to 220 digits. Perhaps now is the time to set some targets for 2013; some easy, some hard.An easy target is to factor all composites under 150 digits A harder target would be to factor all with SNFS difficulty under 220 digits Another hard target is to find 500 factors in total. A very hard target would be to raise the fully factored total to 10,000 --- this requires well over 200 complete factorizations. Paul

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