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New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

mersenne.org

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Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#91

Post by shawnz »

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #34
aphantastic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?

If bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating. But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.

The work in a PoW algorithm has to be otherwise useless in order for it to most effectively deter abuse, or else you'd still be able to get value out of failed attack attempts

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#92

Post by p5a0u9l »

Are there statistics on the scale of compute available to GIMPS for this search? Is there any evidence that by crowdsourcing the clients, we are searching faster than, eg, a dedicated cluster financed by a government or a corporation? What is the impact of GIMPS as a distributed problem solving tool? Like, if there was a practical application, how much money would it take to exceed GIMPS throughput, that curious people provide for free?

I’d like it to be astronomical, but given the niche of this, and the low cost of cloud compute, the answer is predicable depressing, like, “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput”

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#93

Post by mort96 »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #86
mort96 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we expect to learn something interesting from any given new Mersenne prime discovered? Don't we kinda have enough so that if we are going to discover something interesting by analyzing them, we can do that with the ones we already know about?

Isn't the fact that a certain number is a Mersenne prime interesting in itself? Surely it's a great addition to our knowledge of numbers?

Sure, I'm not against GIMPS or anything, I'm just a bit doubtful that finding a few more Mersenne primes could be the key to unlocking some secret pattern in the primes is all

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#94

Post by poincaredisk »

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #63
dataflow wrote: post #48

Given this contest can presumably go on infinitely long, what is the ultimate point of the contest? Is there some kind of theoretical or practical benefit to discovering a new Mersenne prime?

>presumably go on infinitely long prove it

It's well established that there are infinite prime numbers, for example https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/p/primeprf.htm

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#96

Post by ashleyn »

therein wrote: post #19
ziofill wrote: post #3

I can swear something like 20+ years ago I found a new one too, but I didn’t realize the importance of it. I had just downloaded GIMPS and I was just messing around with it, and when I saw the message I thought “ok, cool!” and proceeded to turn it off.

I'd believe it. Many years ago when I was around 10 years old and not understanding the concept of probability properly, I decided I had come up with a way to enumerate the lottery numbers and come up with a reasonably sized set of numbers to place bets for. I proceeded to write 9 pages of numbers for my father to place bets for. It is a 6/49 lottery so 6 balls are drawn from a set of 49 and you need to get all of th…

If the balls were improperly weighted at the lottery commission, then maybe you'd have unwittingly discovered the bias in the game. That's certainly possible.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#97

Post by loup-vaillant »

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #34
aphantastic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?

If bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating. But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.

What second order effect are you referring to? Stuff like manufacturing, or fab availability perhaps?

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#98

Post by loup-vaillant »

potench wrote: post #95

For others that, like me, do not know… a Mersenne prime is when the n is prime and the resulting M is also prime in the following equation. M = 2ⁿ - 1

I didn’t know, but according to Wikipedia we don’t need to require `n` to be prime, because when it isn’t, then neither is 2ⁿ-1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime

So I prefer to shorten the definition to "A prime of the form 2ⁿ-1". It’s bloody useful that n has to be prime though: makes searching that much faster.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#99

Post by onionisafruit »

throwawee wrote: post #74
hinkley wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luggage that would make Dan Brown green with envy.

Needlessly confusing if Dan Brown is green and Dan Green is white. Somebody standardize Dans.

Danny White is white, so that's a start
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