So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.
I know typically jokes like this aren't HN material, but have an up vote lol
Literally, the first thing I though of was GIMP as well :)
GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#32Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#33Is there actually any use to discovering ever-larger prime numbers?
I know that's probably not what you mean but there is money prizes: https://www.eff.org/awards/coop
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevant thing is not that's a prime (it's pretty trivial to find one), but a Mersenne Prime Primality testing is not trivial at those number sizes
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
But the biggest reason that the largest known primes have this form is that they are subject to a much faster special-form primality test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas%E2%80%93Lehmer_primality...
There's no known general-form primality test that is nearly as fast for numbers of corresponding sizes.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#35So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.
GIMPS = Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Completely unrelated (apart from similar naming) to the GIMP (GNU Image Editing Program). Perhaps you were joking; but I'm sure others might be confused.
That was very clearly a joke. Good one too.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevant thing is not that's a prime (it's pretty trivial to find one), but a Mersenne Prime Primality testing is not trivial at those number sizes
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.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#37> Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years. What a great story.
I know he's a volunteer but only $3000? Does that seem low to anyone else?
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#38> Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years. What a great story.
I know he's a volunteer but only $3000? Does that seem low to anyone else?
For producing something of no intrinsic monetary value?
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#39so I didn't know this, but got curious about how many known prime there are - I knew there were infinite primes, but thought that there would be some concrete list of all the primes that we had discovered somewhere - but apparently not https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-pri... > Nobody's really keeping count. ... There are very many hundred-digit primes to find. We could cover the Earth in hardd…
Not only are there an infinite number of primes, there are so many that the inverse series diverges. That is, Sum 1/p_i is infinite.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#40There is rarely a submission here on Hacker News that has comments of such bad quality as this submission has.
I see a similar phenomenon with press. They "hype" something they barely understand, change parts of the story to make it more interesting, or invent new words (Cyber!). This is a disservice.
What do you do to avoid this noise?