The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
washingtonpost.com
The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#2>"Anyone can download the software free. So you, too, could discover a record-breaking prime number — if you have enough patience."
Maybe mining zcash is lucrative, but finding a new big prime number sounds pretty nice
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#3>"Anyone can download the software free. So you, too, could discover a record-breaking prime number — if you have enough patience." Maybe mining zcash is lucrative, but finding a new big prime number sounds pretty nice
I wish we can collectively "mine" solutions for questions that are currently un-solved.
Like Larger prime number, or create a hive mind that acts as an AI.
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#4I have two questions:
1: How do we know it's the largest known prime number? What qualifies as a 'known' prime number? Is there an official registry somewhere?
2: Are all prime numbers smaller then this one also known? Or could somebody still come up with an unknown 'not very large prime number'?
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#5I have two questions: 1: How do we know it's the largest known prime number? What qualifies as a 'known' prime number? Is there an official registry somewhere? 2: Are all prime numbers smaller then this one also known? Or could somebody still come up with an unknown 'not very large prime number'?
https://www.mersenne.org/primes/
For Mersennes at least, which right now are the largest primes.
A prime is known once you've shown it is prime, i.e. no factors other than 1 and itself.
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#6>"Anyone can download the software free. So you, too, could discover a record-breaking prime number — if you have enough patience." Maybe mining zcash is lucrative, but finding a new big prime number sounds pretty nice
I wish we can collectively "mine" solutions for questions that are currently un-solved. Like Larger prime number, or create a hive mind that acts as an AI.
Isn't that the point of projects like folding@home?
And hive mind AI is literally skynet.
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#7Quote from the Article: """The figure is calculated by multiplying 2 by itself 77,232,917 times and then subtracting 1."""
Would HN agree that multiplying 2 by itself once is 2⨯2 = pow(2,2), twice is 2⨯2⨯2 = pow(2,3) and N times yields pow(2,N+1)?
The Mersenne Prime found is pow(2,77232917) − 1, hence the article got the number wrong?
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#8I have two questions: 1: How do we know it's the largest known prime number? What qualifies as a 'known' prime number? Is there an official registry somewhere? 2: Are all prime numbers smaller then this one also known? Or could somebody still come up with an unknown 'not very large prime number'?
1. Essentially, yes there's a list. Since there doesn't exist a higher level formula to identify primes it's been verified by some variation of a brute force method.
2. That all smaller primes are known can't be verified. Primes of this size are usually found by a number of formulas that find "likely" primes and then verified by brute force (afaik). Because of that fuzzy match to start there might be smaller primes that haven't yet been identified.
Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#9Quote from the Article: """The figure is calculated by multiplying 2 by itself 77,232,917 times and then subtracting 1.""" Would HN agree that multiplying 2 by itself once is 2⨯2 = pow(2,2), twice is 2⨯2⨯2 = pow(2,3) and N times yields pow(2,N+1)? The Mersenne Prime found is pow(2,77232917) − 1, hence the article got the number wrong?
If you're going that way, you can also interpret it - pardon my programming - as the following:
int result;
for (int i = 0; i Re: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has more than 23M digits
#10I have two questions: 1: How do we know it's the largest known prime number? What qualifies as a 'known' prime number? Is there an official registry somewhere? 2: Are all prime numbers smaller then this one also known? Or could somebody still come up with an unknown 'not very large prime number'?
1. Essentially, yes there's a list. Since there doesn't exist a higher level formula to identify primes it's been verified by some variation of a brute force method. 2. That all smaller primes are known can't be verified. Primes of this size are usually found by a number of formulas that find "likely" primes and then verified by brute force (afaik). Because of that fuzzy match to start there might be smaller primes t…
Calling it brute force isn't quite right. There is an efficient algorithm for prime determination (Lucas-Lehmer primality test) on Mersenne Primes (numbers of the form 2^p-1).