TIL 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.....
GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
61–70 of 115 posts
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#62so 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…
> but thought that there would be some concrete list of all the primes that we had discovered
It is trivial (in computational power) to find a random prime in order of 2^2048. So such a list would be way to big to store somewhere and always be out of date. It is not hard to find very big primes. It is just hard to find very very big primes.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#63tl;dr The 50th Mersenne prime was just found by a volunteer of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is 2^77,232,917-1 and has 23,249,425 digits. Mersenne primes are extremely rare and are always of the form 2^p-1 for some positive integer p. The first four Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127.
Also, p is prime.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#64There 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?
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Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#65> 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?
He's probably spent more than that on electricity to max out his CPUs for 14 years.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#66so 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…
I also used to think that there weren't very many primes. But the prime number theorem says that the number of primes less than n is about n/log(n). The function log doesn't grow very fast, so a large proportion of numbers are prime. For example the number of primes less than 10^100 is 4*10^97. Primes are really really common.
Much more common than square numbers, for example. sum(1/n^2) converges, but sum(1/p) for p prime doesn't.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link has another link to a page describing why this matters: http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html
> Mersennes are beautiful and have some surprising applications. Unfortunately that page doesn’t elaborate on what these surprising applications are, which is itself surprising on a page that purports to answer “why”.
One application is that it's fairly cheap to take `n mod p` when `p` is on the form $2^q-1$. In particular
x ≡ x mod 2^q + ⌊x/2^q⌋ (mod p).
Another application of slightly larger Mersennes is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#68Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#69I believe the classic joke goes, "Now Bruce Schneier needs to change the code on his luggage"
If you hack his computer, you can find the next largest known prime?
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#70[deleted]