🚀 go-pugleaf

It has been a little over a week since I announced that I would coordinate a
second GIPPP to estimate the area of the Mandelbrot Set.  Here's what has
happened since then:
 
* I have received responses from quite a few people, representing a combined
computing resource that is sufficient to take on the amount of work that I
am planning on trying to do.
 
* Jay Hill has advised me to consider using a very high dwell limit, on the
order of 8388608 or 16777216, inasmuch as the error due to sampling seems
to be significantly lower than the error due to the dwell limits that I was
originally planning to use.  I am currently running a series of area
estimates on ten grids ranging from 8200x4100 through 8218x4109, to get an
idea of what the standard deviation of the error really is for the
8192x4096 case.  That will give me a very reliable point from which I can
extrapolate the sampling error for the 65536 or 131072 case that we'll be
running.  It appears now that the 131072x65536 size is the one I'll pick; I
was originally planning a larger size but it is now clear that I can get a
better estimate in the same time by increasing the dwell limit and
decreasing the grid size.
 
* A few people have expressed concerns that they will only be able to run on
weekends or at night, etc.  I want to point out that I am planning on
asking people with UNIX(tm) systems to run the program on a "nice" level of
19, which effectively means that it will take up time only when no other
processes are waiting to use the CPU.  Based on my experience on the
Sparcstations here at my office, this technique works quite well.
 
* Another important thing to note about the program is that it will
periodically save its work and automatically restart from where it left
off, faciliating easy recovery from unexpected crashes, etc.  The data that
you will need to send back will be very small, and it will contain a
checksum so I can verify accurate transmission.
-- 
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