New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably) • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#111

Post by einpoklum » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

dgacmu wrote: post #108

freeqaz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good POW mechanism that would test primes? I found this but curious what else exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin

Primecoin (Cunningham chains) Gapcoin (finding large gaps between successive primes) Riecoin (finding maximally dense prime clusters of size 6) Nexus (finding almost-dense clusters with a maximum spacing between successive primes) As an aside, picking a mathematically interesting and intricate proof of work function is probably a bad idea, because someone like me will come along and optimize the miner and mine privat…

Don't forget:

Primemarkcoin

Perceptiongapcoin

Liecoin

epiplexiscoin

and of course, the every useful pyramidcoin and scamcoin.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#112

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 6:53 PM UTC

zeven7 wrote: post #46

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This reminded me that I used to leave my computer running Folding@home or similar projects around 2010-2011. Not sure if it ever contributed to anything. If only I had known to run a Bitcoin miner instead!

I ran the SETI software as well. Was not Bitcoin mining....

I suspect neither your or I though have ever had to turn over a landfill looking for a hard drive. So there's that anyway.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#113

Post by Jerrrrrrry » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 7:17 PM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #105

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>presumably go on infinitely long prove it

I didn't claim there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes. I said the contest could presumably go on infinitely long. The latter doesn't require the former. It's only predicated on us lacking proofs about how many there must be.

  >I didn't claim there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes.

I didn't claim that you did, only that the contest...

you actually almost got me :)

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#114

Post by gnramires » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:12 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #65

noduerme wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazing how many bitcoins have been discovered since then. Satoshi should've incentivized mining something useful.

Are these high Mersenne primes all that useful?

I've been thinking there should actually be more useful (or at least more interesting? :P) crowd computing stuff.

How about something like Superoptimizing (with correctness proofs) open source code?

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#115

Post by schoen » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:23 PM UTC

fhars wrote: post #84

schoen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EFF Cooperative Computing Awards, which pay out money for (four specific sizes of) prime records, were meant to show off how the Internet is useful for letting people who don't even know each other work together to solve problems. They were established back in 1998, when people in general were much less familiar with the Internet and its impact. That specific contest isn't set up to go on forever, as it ends when…

And wasn't that paper just poking fun at people who still used something as outdated as RSA as the default public key crypto primitive in the 2010s by extrapolating their position to its logical extreme?

I think there was an intended humor element there, particularly since some of those people were also working on new post-quantum primitives, but they also "committed to the bit" and did the research for real.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#116

Post by lupire » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:25 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #102

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember some rough calculations suggested I needed to upgrade from agp to pcie to make bitcoin mining worth it financially. I went with boinc instead.

I remember calculating that the 0.08 btc that I was mining per day on my desktop wasn't worth the electricity.

That's exactly how Bitcoin is designed to autobalance. It's only worthwhile if you believe demand will increase in future.

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#117

Post by dataflow » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

Jerrrrrrry wrote: post #113

dataflow wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't claim there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes. I said the contest could presumably go on infinitely long. The latter doesn't require the former. It's only predicated on us lacking proofs about how many there must be.

>I didn't claim there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes. I didn't claim that you did, only that the contest... you actually almost got me :)

I mean, that's what I took from your comment here, quoting my "presumably": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41888609

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#118

Post by lupire » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:32 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #90

aaronmdjones wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all 2^N - 1 are prime. For example, N=18 makes 2^N - 1 = 262143, which can also be written as 3^3 * 7 * 19 * 73 (not prime).

A lot simpler example is 2^4-1=5*3

2^11-1 (prime power) for a less trivial example

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#119

Post by fuglede_ » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 8:34 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #23

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.

If it was literally around "20+ years ago", like 2004 or slightly before, it might have been M40 or M41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mersenne_primes_and_pe... If this happened the way you remember, it's really unfortunate, but it wouldn't have stopped the prime in question from being discovered, because GIMPS always at least eventually gives out numbers to multiple people to check, and doesn't mark Mersenne…

I'm curious how this is organized.

> because GIMPS always at least eventually gives out numbers to multiple people to check

For the 40th Mersenne prime, 2²⁰⁹⁹⁶⁰¹¹ − 1, for example, the status page on mersenne.org seems to suggest only a single check (and a handful of later NF checks later), but maybe follow-up proofs and proof certifications and reruns are omitted? https://www.mersenne.org/report_exponent/?exp_lo=20996011&fu...

Also, when you sign up, you're asked to provide an email address in case they want to get in touch with you, so even if OP didn't themselves do so, I imagine they would include their work just the same?

> However, your name could have ended up on that Wikipedia list as a discoverer. :-)

Along the same lines, since each (potential) prime is being worked on by many computers, some looking for factors, some running the Fermat test, some running proof certification work, who gets the "discoverer" title; just the person who ran the PRP test? If so, seems fair enough, since that's where most of the computational budget ends up, but on the other hand, it seems like that would disincentivize running anything but PRP tests. But maybe the people involved are just in it for the mission (or the GHz day leaderboards).

Re: New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

#120

Post by michaelcampbell » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 12:18 PM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #114

yreg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these high Mersenne primes all that useful?

I've been thinking there should actually be more useful (or at least more interesting? :P) crowd computing stuff. How about something like Superoptimizing (with correctness proofs) open source code?

I think there's actually a fair number of them, but more would be nice. Lots of protein folding ones, and there used to be a weather/climate related couple.