Welcome to the Rogue Primes homepage


"What are Rogue primes," you ask?  To put it simply, "Rogue Primes" are primes that I search for and my nickname is "rogue".  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

About me

My real name is Mark Rodenkirch and I go by the nickname of "rogue" because that is the name of the first role playing game I ever played back in the 80's.  You can contact me here, an e-mail account which I've used for many years.

Today I responsible for writing or maintaining sieving software used for many projects, which you can find below.  I also maintain a lot of software that I did not write and tend to add useful features when necessary.  I also wrote the current version of ECMNet and am the author of PRPNet.

About rogue, the game

To those of you who know about the "Daggers of Musty Doit" and "Mandolin of Brian", you know exactly what I'm talking about.  It was the goal of me and my classmates to defeat the game and escape the dungeon.  My friends and I can tell you about Saturdays spent in the computer lab playing side by side seeing who could get the closest the beating the game.  Eventually we learned enough about the game so that we could beat it, but it wasn't easy.  Even knowing all of the tricks in the game still doesn't make it easy to beat.  All I can say is "cursed staff of disintegration" and "Friendly Fiend's Flea Market".  It took me a few years to find the source code to that game, but once I had it, I ported it to my Mac and have played on and off ever since.  The funny thing is that I had to fix quite a few bugs as it wasn't even C89 compliant and it had tons of memory leaks.  It was the hard way to learn C.  With a friend we actually tried to rewrite it in Java around 2000 and actually had quite a bit of it working, such as dungeon generation, monster play, weapons, potions, etc, but we never finished it.  Writing code for 200+ monsters with all of their special attacks was going to be too tedious.  Nevertheless it was a worthwhile experience.

I cannot point you to the game sources or executables, but I do know that they can be found on the Internet fairly easily with a little bit of searching.

2016 Update
I found that I hadn't played rogue in a while so I started it up again.  The bad news is that I ran into new bugs.  Apparently the current version of clang is less forgiving than the version of gcc that I had built it with.  Instead of trying to debug I decided to get a fresh copy of the source (version 5.8.2) as I only had 5.8.  5.8.2 is also ancient, but likely fixes a few bugs.  I have spent a number of evenings getting to be C99 compliant and have had to address a number of other bad memory access problems along the way.  I've made a number of changes to remove a number of global variables which are one source of the memory access issues.  I just wish I had a useful code formatter to fix the awful formatting of the code.  The available formatters are too difficult to configure or reformat code in a way that doesn't help.

My Software

If I haven't posted a link yet, then it means that the code can be found elsewhere, but needs to be cleaned up.

mtsieve - a framework for many of my sieving programs. All programs using framework can be found via the link.

fsievecl - a sieve for Factorials, optimized for the GPU, also suppots mulit-factorials and inverse factorials. This will be ported to mtsieve in the near future.

gcwsievecl - an OpenCL sieve for finding factors of Cullen and Woodall numbers.

srsieve - a sieve for finding factors of k*b^n+-c numbers

sr1sieve - a sieve for finding factors of k*b^n+-c numbers for a single k, b, n, and c

sr2sieve - a sieve for finding factors of k*b^n+-c numbers for multiple k, b, n, and c

ECMNet - a client/server application for factoring numbers using ECM

PRPNet - a client/server applications for finding prime numbers

pfgw - a program that can PRP test anything, using George Woltman's gwnum library

wwww - a program for finding Wieferich and Wall-Sun-Sun primes

wwwwcl - an OpenCL version of wwww

MultiSieve - a older Windows GUI application for sieving numbers of various forms.  I no longer support it.  Fortunately most of the sieves it supports are written as 64-bit apps that are much faster.  If you absolutely gotta have it, then send me a request and I can share the source.

About the projects (in no particular order)

Alternating Factorials - the sum of consecutive factorials with alternating signs

Smarandache-Wellin - primes generated from a string of consecutive numbers

Copeland-Erdos - primes generated from a string of consecutive prime numbers

Generalized Woodalls and Cullens - Numbers in the form b^n-1 (Woodall) and b^n+1 (Cullen)

Conjectures 'R Us - primes to help prove Sierpinski and Riesel conjectures of various bases

Carol / Kynea - a form of Near Square numbers with the form (b^n-1)^2-2 and (b^n+1)^2-2

Multifactorial - a derivative of the Factorials with the form m!n-1 and m!n+1