Comments on the following newsitem http://bearnol.is-a-geek.com/wanless2/all_news.php#22

These math projects sometimes confuse me, about the objective. Finding a prime once is usually good enough. Add a few more time for validation. I get that.

I am still not clear why finding this thing 1541 times is a good thing. Can someone please help me understand?

The news item is stating that they have found a factor of the number. The goal of WEP-M+2 is to find factors of Mersenne plus 2 numbers. Reason: ?. But the goal, from some of the other posts is to find the largest factor currently standing at 12 digits.

I think it's just bad wording, and it actually means "1541 12-digit factors have been found by this project; still none larger than 12 digits".

No. It is just one factor. The algorithm seems to find "random" sized factors, not factors of increasing size. So this one pops up quite often.

So are they just checking numbers at random rather than systematically? You'd think that numbers already checked a few times would be excluded from future workunits.