Elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem

Robert Harley wrote:

Hello everybody,

We have just passed two months of computation and have already found 50% of the initially estimated number of distinguished points! The number of people participating is still increasing (about 1300 so far) and nearly 6000 machines have sent in some distinguished points.

Due to the way the birthday paradox works, our chance of success was very low at first but is now increasing rapidly. At the moment it looks like we have about 1 chance in 2 of solving Certicom's problem in one more month.

Our software appears to be working fine. No serious bugs have cropped up. We run tests on the distinguished points arriving here and almost all are correct. A few need manual fixing (due to mailers having put a line break in the middle of a hex number, for instance).

All in all, this project is ticking along very nicely indeed. It is already the biggest elliptic curve calculation ever, by a long shot! It is highly likely that will soon succeed and be able to donate a
chunk of cash to support the most popular HTTP server on the Internet, Apache, and related open-source software projects.

Thank you all for participating and good luck in finding the matching points!
Rob.