Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy things with Bitcoin.
You can buy things with $3000 cash as well.
But not a Bitcoin
GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
101–110 of 115 posts
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#102So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.
Can anyone explain why it takes so long? It also seems to launch a lot faster on linux than on macOS, I wonder why.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#103But why? One answer is a bit buried in a sub link in the article. On that page, you’ll find arguments for the following reasons: tradition, by products of the quest, collection of rare mathematical things, glory, pushing hardware performance, and contest rewards. Personally I’m forced to admit I enjoy seeing them found while being unable to form any cogent justification. http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html
That's actually a fairly complete and accurate list of reasons for such a project. If I was interested, I'd do it for about half of those reasons, and others may prefer the other half.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#104TIL I work at the same company as the discoverer of the 50th known Mersenne Prime. I know at least one sysadmin who used GIMPS as a burn-in program for new servers.....
It’s common for stress-testing overclocking, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95#Use_for_stress_testing
I use Prime95 to test for usage-related recording lags for sound and video recording in our lab equipment. If we're not getting signal de-synchronization with that slamming the CPU(s), we can worry a bit less.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, those primes' primality is normally proven statistically rather than deductively. This is not really a practical issue for people using RSA, but could be a philosophical issue for someone interested in the question of how many different numbers' primality has been proven by humanity.
When philosophers study mankind's knowledge, it's more typical to study the things mankind would ideally know at the end of all time assuming mankind could continue forever. (Formally: the knowledge predicate is usually assumed to satisfy modus ponens: if mankind knows "A implies B" and mankind knows "A", then mankind knows "B") Under this abstraction, if mankind knows the axioms of logic and Peano arithmetic, then m…
> then mankind [ideally eventually] knows the primality of all primes
We already know the primality of all primes. They're prime. All numbers though . . .
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading over that, I actually recognize I miss the older HN - where the conversations seemed fairly long and in depth. It's still often the case, but it does seem like the average length and depth is decreasing.
"Nostalgia was better in the old days" ~ unknown author
"I remember when I used to be really into nostalgia"
- Demetri Martin
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#107Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#108Prime numbers are amazing. I was watching a math documentary and one example was a Cicada in North Carolina that only emerges once every thirteen years millions of them at once. It's a defense mechanism the sheer number overwhelms predators. The Cicada does this also to avoid appearing when another species of Cicada appears to prevent cross breeding. The other species in the same region emerges every 7 years. The two…
This is a similar concept to the odd numbers of teeth used in gear chains. If you had an 8-tooth and a 16-tooth gear, they will wear unevenly as the same teeth (with potential manufacturing defects) always meet the same teeth. If you change that to 7-tooth and 17-tooth, they will only repeat pairings every 119 teeth and wear will be distributed evenly across all teeth. In general, tooth numbers that are relatively prime (sharing no divisors) are preferred.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
nowadays bitcoin mining rigs use ASICs that are optimized for the task, so I don't think that would be a good idea. on a general purpose system you can use GPUs and BOINC with SETI, not sure about GIMPS.
I see. Thanks. I do have some PC systems but they are shared among family members, making it difficult to run BOINC as a background task without interfering with their work. I'll look at low-cost systems, like the Raspberry Pi, to see if I can use them as dedicated BOINC boxes instead.
Indeed, Bitcoin ASICs are not only "optimized" for the Bitcoin mining task (computing a particular hash function), they usually literally don't include the logic to perform other general-purpose computations at all! That's a big contrast with GPUs.
There have been interesting discussions about a cryptocurrency whose proof of work task would be something in some way more interesting or more useful than partial hash collisions, but I don't think many such systems have caught on. There is a prime-related one called Primecoin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
So, I guess that's a precedent for creating new cryptocurrency designs that do something else. I don't know if there's a way to make any of the BOINC tasks into cheap-to-verify PoW systems or if anyone's tried to do so, but that might be a cool project.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
not really, it is very hard to test any very large number for primality... this project only test numbers that satisfy the Mersenne prime definition though... 9 of the 10 known largest primes are Mersenne prime numbers probably because there is more people testing these numbers. http://primes.utm.edu/largest.html#biggest
People test these because it's the easiest pattern we know of for constructing large primes. So if you want to maximize your chances of finding a large prime, you'll check for the mersenne form.
people test these because we have the technology to check if a large number of the Mersenne form is prime at a faster speed than numbers that do not conform.