Help TeamRetro become the biggest distributed computing team to solve a historical mathematical problem!

Are you one of many people who leave their computers on all the time? Want to let that idle computer contribute to something useful instead of doing nothing? Check out SeventeenOrBust, a distributed computing website that is devoted to finally solving the last 17 remaining Sierpinski prime numbers! What is it you ask?

"SB (Seventeen or Bust) is a distributed attack on the Sierpinski problem. Our system utilizes the spare computational power of hundreds of computers around the world, creating a powerful network of machines working together on the problem. Anyone can participate: we provide a piece of software that installs on your computer and uses its "spare time" to help our project. You won't even notice it's running, since it only uses your processor if it would otherwise be sitting unused.

The Sierpinski problem itself deals with numbers of the form N = k * 2^n + 1, for any odd k and n > 1. Numbers of this form are called Proth numbers. If, for some specific value of k, every possible choice of n results in a composite (non-prime) Proth number N, then that k is called a Sierpinski number. The Sierpinski problem itself is: "What is the smallest Sierpinski number?" (For a more rigorous mathematical discussion of the problem, see prothsearch.net's Sierpinski Problem page.)

John Selfridge proved, 40 years ago, that k = 78,557 is a Sierpinski number. Most number theorists believe that this is the smallest, but it hasn't yet been proven. In order to prove it, we have to show that every single k less than 78,557 is not a Sierpinski number, and to do that, we have to find some n that makes k * 2^n + 1 prime. When Seventeen or Bust was started, this had already been done for all but 17 values of k; hence the name of the project. After 8 months of computation, we have eliminated 5 multipliers: five down, twelve to go." (courtesy of SB website)

Now, how can you help? A whole bunch of us Retro-freaks have ganged up to create our own team to contribute! We are currently the biggest and fastest group going, and with your help possibly even help find one of the primes! Unlike other types of distributed computing projects out there, this project is actually beneficial to the mathematics society, and will lay to rest a previously unsolved mathematical problem and place the results into the annals of history! Help us out by visiting SeventeenOrBust and joining up, then joining with TeamRetro.

(note: the software is very friendly, and does NOT in any way interfere with any task on your computer or slow your computer down in any way while you're using it. It simply uses unused CPU cycles that would otherwise go to waste. And one final note, if you are running XP/2000, please make sure you have installed the latest service pack from Microsoft, as the SB client has some issues with a few users not working properly until they do so).