Despres have found other Lychrel candidates. Indeed, Benjamin Despres' program has identified all suspected Lychrel seed numbers of less than 17 digits. Wade Van Landingham's site lists the total number of found suspected Lychrel seed numbers for each digit length. The brute-force method originally deployed by John Walker has been refined to take advantage of iteration behaviours. For example, Vaughn Suite devised a program that only saves the first and last few digits of each iteration, enabling testing of the digit patterns in millions of iterations to be performed without having to save each entire iteration to a file. However, so far no algorithm has been developed to circumvent the reversal and addition iterative process. Threads, seed and kin numbers The term thread, coined by Jason Doucette, refers to the sequence of numbers that may or may not lead to a palindrome through the reverse and add process. Any given seed and its associated kin numbers will converge on the same thread. The thread does not include the original seed or kin number, but only the numbers that are common to both, after they converge. Seed numbers are a subset of Lychrel numbers, that is the smallest number of each non palindrome producing thread. A seed number may be a palindrome itself. The first three examples are shown in bold in the list above. Kin numbers are a subset of Lychrel numbers, that include all numbers of a thread, except the seed, or any number that will converge on a given thread after a single iteration. This term was introduced by Koji Yamashita in 1997. 196 palindrome quest Because 196 (base-10) is the lowest candidate Lychrel number, it has received the most attention. In the 1980s, the 196 palindrome problem attracted the attention of microcomputer hobbyists, with search programs by Jim Butterfield and others appearing in several mass-market computing magazines. In 1985 a program by James Killman ran unsuccessfully for over 28 days, cycling through 12,954 passes and reaching a 5366-digit number. John Walker began his 196 Palindrome Quest on 12 August 1987 on a Sun 3/260 workstation. He wrote a C program to perform the reversal and addition iterations and to check for a palindrome after each step. The program ran in the background with a low priority and produced a checkpoint to a file every two hours and when the system was shut down, recording the number reached