Background:

The Cunningham project may be the longest ongoing computational project in history. See https://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~ssw/cun/. As of this writing there are 21 numbers as yet unfactored from the 1987 published version of the book. These are all numbers of the form 2^n+1 for n < 1200 and 2^(2n+1) +/- 2^(n+1) + 1 for n < 600

A number of years ago a big push was made to finish all Mersenne numbers (2^n-1) for n < 1200.

It would be nice to finish this last small set of composites. They were added to the tables in the early 1960's by John Selfridge and D.H. Lehmer, so have been waiting for over 60 years to get done. Attempts to factor these numbers have been made since the time of Fermat, so they have strong historical interest.

Current status and request:

A BOINC project (https://escatter11.fullerton.edu/nfs/) is currently being run that uses the Number Field Sieve to factor these numbers, but it is "running out of steam".

While this sort of project is out of scope in terms of not using Wolfram Language or related, it nonetheless might appeal to some participants in this forum, especially those with amateur (or professional) interests in computational number theory. And joining the project does not presume or require factoring expertise. It is a generic BOINC project, similar to SETI at Home, Protein Folding at Home, etc. That is to say, it's a distributed crowd-sourced effort.

This is a request for people to join the project to help finish these composites. This project pushes the state of the art in factoring algorithms.