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Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

saytheprime.com

11–20 of 158 posts

Re: Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

#11
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least the calculations are easier It takes about 3s to say 10 "one"s There are 136,279,841 ones in the binary mersenne prime That works out to about 41 million seconds worth of footage, or about 473 days Given there was a gap of 6 years between the discovery of this mersenne prime and the previous, in theory 1 person could say all the digits (in binary) before we find the next mersenne prime!

Sure, if that one person can stay awake and not eat/drink and use the restroom, sure. Otherwise, you need to make this union happy with 8 hour shifts, 2 15 minute breaks, and a minimum of 12 hour turn around before next shift. If they work more than 8 hours in a day, they are entitled to over time. Working a sixth day in a row is automatic 1.5x pay, and seven consecutive days is automatic 2x pay. Want to run your cal…

"The largest known prime is two raised to the power of one hundred thirty six million two hundred seventy nine thousand eight hundred forty one, minus one" only took me 8.2 seconds to say aloud at a normal speaking pace. :)

Re: Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

#12
Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence correctly?

It would be a silly and pointless prank to derail the effort by omitting a number on purpose, but this is the internet... Or maybe it's just the 'coming together' aspect that we're going for anyway, in which case, it doesn't matter :)

Re: Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

#19

Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence correctly? It would be a silly and pointless prank to derail the effort by omitting a number on purpose, but this is the internet... Or maybe it's just the 'coming together' aspect that we're going for anyway, in which case, it doesn't matter :)

> Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence correctly?

It's trivial-ish to do.

First iteration - Google already auto-transcribes, just download the subtitles and compare to the required numbers.

Someone else keen can check if that works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDAGe7lsII

Re: Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

#20
post #16

Btw, is it possible to say such number at all? In English, I mean. How would that work?

Probably not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers only lists up to a Millinillion, or 10^3003. You can compound them, but it kinda defeats the point. A googol is too small, and a googolplex is too large.
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