Slashdot Mirror
(Mostly) Confirmed: New Mersenne Prime Found
A reader writes "Distributed computing seems once more to be succesful. The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found there fifth result. Among them many belonging to /. readers. There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits, for which a considerable amount of money has been awarded. SETI looks for ET's messages, but found none sofar. Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us. A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space. " The Primenet list has confirmed that while they still need to totally test it out (which should be done by the 24th), they believe that the number found today is the 39th positive.
just think if we dedicated all this computering power to a relevant problem...and before you ask, i'm a grad student in math, so don't call me out of touch with mathematics. i just think there are plenty of better problems (including w/in mathematics) than this, of course, why does my opinion matter?
I believe distributed computing has a lot of potential. Even though we are still in the early stages of it look at what has come out of it. It just amazes me that I can help find new prime numbers or search for ET from the comfort of my home. ( And without frying my brain thinking about it )
FearLinux.com
until the 10 million digit mersenne prime is found, if one exists.
very interesting... but hey, this should pump a few more clients into SETI@home, rc5, and the rest of the bunch.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
"Distributed computing seems once more to be succesful. The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found there fifth result. Among them many belonging to /. readers (This is not a complete sentence; there is no verb!). There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits, for which a considerable amount of money has been awarded. SETI looks for ET's messages, but found none sofar. Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us. A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space. "
cpeterso
...hasn't found this number is prime yet? Won't he/she just think this 3,500,000 digit number is a bunch of gibberish?
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
That we devote this much co-operation, time and energy to the quest for prime numbers while hatred, poverty, disease and environmental destruction continue to plague our race is hardly an advertisement for our planet's advancement.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
3,500,000 digits is only 1/3 the length required for the major ($100,000) payoff. We still have a long way to go for that one....
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
First: distributed computing achieving something great. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for SETI, I've got it running on both my machines ... but being able to advance science be it math or cancer research or whatever is astonishingly cool.
... If they're astonishingly more advanced than us they'll look at it as being quaint and if they're not they'll look at it as something they can't understand. How would we react if something landed that proclaimed how smart the sender was?
Second: it's entertaining to think we can prove our intelligence to another species by sending them proof that we've cracked a prime
Of course, if they're "looking" at the wrong frequency or in the wrong band they won't see it at all... so many assumptions... so little time.
I am a leaf on the wind
Does anyone have an envelope with this stamp on it?
Andrew Wiles
a**n + b**n != c**n for n > 2
ET has no concept of our numbers?
I always find the idea that ET is "like" us somehow. That Will Smith can get into and operate an alien spaceship.
Zog: Mumtar! The Earthlings have sent us I Love Lucy and now what appears to be a very large cable bill!
Mumtar: Destroy them!
This
I really wish that more folks would look over at Stanford's Folding@Home Project . I personally think it is the single most important and fascinating distributed computing project available. Just think, instead of searching for obscure numbers, or aliens, or trying to break the latest RSA key, you could be curing cancer with your spare CPU cycles!!!
Please, join in the fun. Go to www.mersenne.org to join. You've got an approximately 1 in 100,000 chance of winning the next EFF prize for finding a 10,000,000 digit prime number. That's way better than playing the lottery folks!
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I think you'ill find that it's speaking "correct" english, not "proper" english :)
What do you get if you save the prime as something.zip and unzip it?
Something juicy?
---
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
You can help cure cancer with http://foldingathome.standford.edu.
I've been using Mersenne Prime #39 as my Slashdot password for years.
Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us.
I wonder if it'll encourage or dicourage them from making first contact with us if they think we're all a bunch of math geeks with too much time on our hands?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
But how is this relevant to ANY of the actual problems that face the world. Is this number going to feed the hungry? Is it going to shelter the homeless?
There are other projects that need these CPU cycles... projects like SETI are a waste.
If aliens are flying around in saucers from galaxies LIGHT YEARS away - then they will laugh at our "primitive" technologies. If they want to contact us - they WILL. And they probably already know about us already.
And if they don't, but have superior technologies - it's like sending them a message "Hi - we have inferior technology - come colonize our planet".
I'd rather give all my cpu cycles to Distributed.net's RC5-64 project.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
a friend of mine in dallas has a marsenne prime as a phone number and, even cooler, and a number away, also the result of a prime factor as yet another number... please don't crank call him!
A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space.
Yup, ET is going to get our message and probably laugh, "Ha ha, what morons, they've only found the 39th one! Lets defeat their pitiful technology, take their resources, and make them slaves! Muhahahahah!"
How's the quote go? It's better to keep your mouth shut and leave people wondering if you're a fool, than to open it and prove that you are.
>There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits
:)
Uhm... mersene.org is down... but this time it's a confirmed claim of 3,500,000 slashdot-fowarded hits
... just as soon as i get my hands on a $415 thous
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
-Eldurbarn
After the 23rd Mersenne prime was found at the University of Illinois, the mathematics department was so proud that they had their postage meter changed to stamp "2 ^11213-1 is prime" on each envelope. Meanwhile, the humble physicists continued tests on thier time-travel prototype by sending an beaker into the future, wrote it in thier logs, and went home and ate bologna sandwiches.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
If you can't do the time, don't do the prime.
(snort, snicker, guffaw, I can die a happy man now)
Genome@home It does similar things, and is also by PandeGroup. My team gave up on Folding after we had too much trouble with the client, and genome seems much better (of course, Folding has also most likely improved)
My server
Choose any two large Mersenne primes, multiply them together, and there you go: 10,000,000-bit encryption! Totally unbreakable!
Unless they go ahead and brute-force all 39^2 possible such keys... but this would require... err... well... ah crap.
What most people don't tell you about the SETI@home project is that there are far more people processing the data than there is data to process. Most of the packets you're downloading to scan have been scanned dozens of times already--there just isn't enough data to justify all that computing power.
Now, if we built more radio telescopes...
I think the ultimate endeavor of human achievement is Truckzilla. A truck that can eat other trucks and breathes fire. I can see the aliens talking to each other ... "Sir, the terrans are too primitive for us to contact ... all we can receive are long numbers and primitive drawings ... Wait! It seems they have finally developed a truck that breathes fire and can eat other trucks! It's the only true measure of a sophisticated civilization."
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
i expect a mistake every once in a while,
but damn, get a clue, d3wd!
I mean, how biased can /. be ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seriously -- not speaking from a naysayer standpoint or as somebody who thinks that SETI is a complete waste of time, although I am both of these -- what if ETs don't do math?
I know, it's hard to fathom. But imagine this: human appreciation of art and life is rarely build on logical thought. When I say that my favorite painter is John Kacere, it has nothing to do with the trigonometry of his brush strokes and everything to do with what I like, a much more concept ideal. Conversation is a way of attempting to apply logic to what is essentially an illogical process, to explain a biological reaction with words and phrases.
So what would I think if Chewbacca beamed a thirty meg prime number into my PowerBook? I sure as hell wouldn't pick up instantly on its nature. I'd probably try and run it through a gif converter or play it on Audion before I'd think to perform the three year process that would uncover it as a prime number. If we're trying to make contact with primes, it seems that we're restricting our target intelligence to creatures smarter than me. Which seems defeatist. Why not start smaller, with a fibinacci sequence or the differential calculus or a DivX file of "The Facts of Life" (divx having been developed in less than a year)? Don't we realize that they'll want to check our math even if they do figure out what the stream of gibberish we're sending is all about?
And finally, what are they going to think when it gets there? Ifome superintelligent race of beings gets a message of a fact they already knew from a race of eggheads in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milky way, they're not inviting us to the intergalactic luau -- they're taking that hot race of Beings of Pure Sex from Omicron Six!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Why are there more of these projects? I myself, am participating in this one, or rather this.
:(
I used to run moo! (distributed.net) - then SETI@Home, then back to distributed.net. But now I am glad I found this one, makes me feel good to know that I could help cure cancer! I know a few people that could have used one
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Why do you consider negative numbers to be smaller than positive numbers? Most people usually equate the relative size of a number to its absolute value. So the smallest prime is two, and has been known for a long time.
Grumble, Grumble
When I go to http://www.mersenne.org/, I get a large yellow screen saying "Distributed Com", and a few borders, and nothing else. Are they using DCOM for this?
My theory is that they're gone. I mean, really think about it:
20,000 years ago we were going around grunting at each other and living nomadic lives
10,000 years ago we finally began to make small villages, and practice agriculture
500 years ago we finally got the technology to send ships from Europe to North America
200 years ago people still read by candle light, died of infections from wounds, had no telephones or radio
100 years ago people still got around by horse and buggy
60 years ago people did the most complex math problems by hand
30 years ago NASA sent people to the moon with the computing power probably about what is found in a TI-89 calculator
20 years ago no one had ever heard of the internet, and computers were slow and text-based
10 years ago computers started to be a household necessity
5 years ago the internet took off
1 year ago the human genome was mapped
The point is: find someone from 50,000 BC ago and take them forward in time to 15,000BC. they probably wouldn't see a damn bit of difference
you could keep doing that for people of different ages, and the amount of time you could bring them forward without them really not being able to adjust to the massive changes in society would just get smaller and smaller. the time is getting so short now that a person can span it in a lifetime. we have middle-aged people today who are afraid to use computers.
Now try to imagine 100 years into the future. Pretty tough. Might we have real AI? Humans on the Moon and Mars? Computing implanations? Nanotech? Quantum computers? Yep. Pretty shocking. But now try to imagine 10,000 years into the future. It's impossible. IMO there is a very good chance that there will be no such thing as humans, as we know them, 10,000 years from now. We will have advanced into something better than these meat and bone bodies.
And the 20,000 years(max) from when humans first set down roots, and when they will no longer exist as humans, is nothing in galactic terms. It isn't even an eye-blink.
I think any civilization more than about 500 years more advanced than us might actually be *undetectable*. Maybe they exist as pure energy. Maybe they have transcended this universe altogether. Maybe they are studying us right now, but we don't know it because they are doing it from the 4th dimension(like a 3D being looking down on flatland).
I simply think anything beyond the near-future is impossible to even speculate on. The singularity. The end of history. Whatever you want to call it. It will be the end of the human race as we know it.
Well... that's just Prime.
And you're reading a /. thread about primes. Is that any more useful than the people working on primes?
Yeah, more like to broadcast to all those *truly*
advanced civilizations out there just how retarded
we actualy are...
I see it now:
Space alien picking up our pitiful boast:
"3,500,000 digits? Heh - send a probe. We'll kick
their ass then take their stuff."
So how does one join the Slashdot team?
Ok, now, out of all those computers, a few of them are Macs, a few of them are Linux boxes, and a few of them are Win9x boxes. ALL the rest of them run WinNT4 or Win2K. And on all of them (except the Macs), there is some verson of prime95 running. That's a whole lotta P-90 years.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I wonder how long it would take for The Prime Number Shitting Bear to reach this number... ;)
"It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear dumb, than to open it and remove all doubt."
With these two projects you can help find cures for diseases like Alzheimers, Mad Cow even cancer!
:)
http://members.ud.com/projects/cancer/
big project sponsored by university of oxford, NFCR and Intel
http://folding.stanford.edu/
Protein Folding@Home - basically the same, much smaller in scale though
I run the one from UD on my windows desktop, and I run the folding@home client on my linux box
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
When they discover that the 42nd Mersenne Prime is actually 6*9, will all life on Earth suddenly cease?
Ratguy
The EFF webpage says that the big prize ($100,000) is to be awarded for a 10,000,000+ digit prime, so the $100,000 is probably still up for grabs (if you should feel so lucky).
Granted, "greater than 3,500,000" could mean 10,000,000+ digits, but I don't think so...
Am I the only person on the planet who thinks that it's a bad idea to be sending so much coded E-M and junk hardware outsystem in order to make contact with aliens? Seriously, I think it's a bad idea. First contact could be disastrous not because of any communication failure, but because those we contact are blood-thirsty monsters. We're barely two hundred years into the Industrial Revolution, only 60 years into the space age, and we are all still stuck on this planet. I think we should be hiding from the ETs, not welcoming them with open arms, like a planetful of suckers.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
From the Slashdot story posted by Hemos, (Mostly) Confirmed: New Mersenne Prime Found
pc's [Should be PCs.]
there fifth result [their]
money has been awarded [How could this be past tense if the results have not been confirmed?]
sofar [so far, until now]
a message send into outer space. " [two mistakes]
to totally test it out [to test it completely]
It is one of the characteristics of a young child that he or she only cares about himself or herself. It is one of the characteristics of an adult that he or she is considerate of others.
It is time for the Slashdot editors like Hemos to grow up and become responsible adults. Every time they post a story with spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors, they make every reader do more work. The errors are especially difficult for the many Slashdot readers for whom English is not their native language.
Someone who knows English well should edit all stories before they are posted.
An explanation of how the U.S. got involved in violence: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Think of it this way:
If 1 is a factor of -5, then -1 is a factor of 5. But wait! I thought 5 only had two factors!
The reason is that a prime number is a positive integer which only has two positive divisors.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
don't forget that the hungersite.org was a FOR PROFIT organization and that the Red Cross is only using 20% of the 9-11 donations to help the victims... Thanks for the link, I will try it, and yes I seem to be writing flaimbait at the same time (I just can't stand inane liberal logic like 'cure cancer' 'save the children')
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I've always wondered, when they transmit these numbers into space, what encoding/protocol do they use? I mean, it's not likely that an alien race is going to be using ZModem for interstellar communication.
And if they're just doing something like a series of beeps, that would take a LONG time for a 3.5mil digit number.
I agree and I'm totally good at english, but this is a relaxed forum and stuff and even though there editors of the stories their mostly quoting stuff from other people who are bad at english to.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
What are some other distributed computing projects worth joining and donating cycles to?
I thought this was a community. It would seem it is academia (the same academia that puts more into the gramar of its papers and theories than the actual content, much less validity from logical deduction of FACTS)
Written in the form 2^k - 1, where k is also a prime number. They don't know if you can keep making these. There's no proof that an infinite number (or any finite bounded number) exists. They just find them by testing.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I'm not familiar with these primes but are they dependent on a decimal counting system? If so, what if ET doesn't use base 10?
GIMPS methods have already discovered Mersenne primes; experts agree on the technique, and positive results are verifiable. SETI positives are subject to interpretation, have not found any ET's yet, and are not verifiable. Not that it matters, but new primes haven't changed anyone's view of man's place in the cosmos, while SETI hits will be attacked as "theoretical" by religious fundamentalists. BTW, neither GIMPS nor SETI are used to produce advances which can be kept from humanity via intellectual property legislation, unlike distributed processing efforts supporting drug discovery and the like.
Cheers, Toliaro
Will they laugh at our miserable coding skills?
Stop the brainwash
Actually, it turns out that negative numbers are prime, mathematically. It works like this. Anytime you have a "ring" of objects (think of ring as set of objects where you've defined addition and multiplication), there are special elements of that set called "units". These are the elements in the ring which you can divide by, and stay in the set. For example, for the regular integers, the units are 1 and -1. In particular, 2 in not a unit because if you divide by 2, you don't get integers any more.
The way primes are defined in mathematics is that you say that a number is prime if it can only be divided by a unit, or, equivalently, p is prime if, whenever p divides ab, then p must divide either a or b. It is an easy theorem to show that a unit multiplied by a prime is also a prime. Thus, whenever n is prime, then so is (-n).
So, mathematically, it is more appropriate to say that -5 is prime just like 5 is. Of course, it is taught differently in elementary schools, where we say that a prime is positive integer which only has factors one and itself, but this is actually not quite correct.
Now, of course, a reasonable question is why would we consider primes of sets other than the integers? First, it turns out that the definitions, and most of the theorems, of number theory hold in any ring, i.e. any set with both an addition and a multiplication. It's a nice generalization to deal with other sets. Second, it is also practically useful if you're trying to prove things for regular integers also. Unfortunately, the examples for this are a bit too complicated, but trust me, this notion is useful.
}
Come on, give it up, that's
Big karma for some lucky geek, no doubt.
It is ironic that just last week they sent out their first newsletter in about 2 years. It basically said "we haven't found anything in a while, but let's keep plugging away!". One week later they find a mersenne prime.
I get the "digest" form of the mailing list. Here's what I just received this afternoon:
My mirror of the digest
Free unix account: freeshell.org
It's great to see that Distributed.net is getting some work done. SETI's been around for years and they haven't found squat, which is particularly alarming since the damned things were given prime-time showings on CBS last night as well as releasing a new CD.
Yeah.
;)), though I suppose this is a kind of fun one. At least we don't already know the answer.
I've got to say that I'm disappointed in how popular distributed.net RC-5 cracking is. What the hell is the point? The only reason we don't have the key is because they destroyed the hard drive from the computer that generated it. It's easy to calculate how long it would take to find a solution by brute force (which is what they're doing) without actually wasting all of those cycles.
SETI@home seems rather like pseudoscience to me (And without source, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a secret plot from the NSA
I like GIMPS (we are at least learning something new and the results are easily verifiable), though the bio ones you mention are also very neat. Let's hope that more useful projects come out of this idea...
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search keeps all the large milestones here:
http://mersenne.org/status.htm
They haven't added #39 yet, but they probably will by the end of the day!!!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
could someone post the number here please??
props to all dead homiez
There are lots of reasons for joining primenet. Finding ET life is not one. It's more about discovering the beauties of mathematics than anything else.
As one whose been on this project for nearly two years, and has contributed 11.197 years of computational time into it, I feel as if I'm a large part of the project. In fact, there are only 1500 accounts higher than mine in the ranking.
If I was looking for the best way to reach E.T., I would have joined SETI. Saying that our goal is to find E.T. just because SETI is so popular is a big insult. I'm sure 1480 of the 1500 people ahead of me would agree.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET [berkeley.edu] or cracking RC-5 [distributed.net].
Amen brother! Let's go to battle. I'll stack up our 4 prime number discoveries against anything you SETI people have found anyday!
No apologies here! I'm all for starting a flame war. May the most productive way to waste time win... and all that crap!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
You claim that any being advanced enough to notice our signals would be sufficiently advanced to understand at least some math.
Not necessarily. For example, I can observe frequencies in the range between roughly 2x10^1 Hz to 2-4x10^5 Hz (sound), and 4x10^14 Hz - 7.5x10^14 Hz (visible light).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think SETI is scanning in the 1x10^9 Hz to 1x10^10 Hz range (microwave). This leads me to assume that we are hoping that any alien beings are sending (and presumably listening for) signals in this range.
Would it be a stretch to imagine those alien beings having the ability to directly sense microwaves, similar to our ability to see and hear?
Since even a human child can see without knowing even basic math, perhaps our alien observers would be in the same situation.
Just a thought.
There giving away $100k to find a stupid number. Last time I checked $100k would buy a lot of Lawyer time. I'm glad I don't donate to EFF
Your stupid rant was only mildly vomit inducing until you started to talk about 'transcending' and 'beings of pure energy', and finally the knockout blow, 'super-powerful beings looking down on us', a clear god-metaphor. Go hand out bibles and your phone number to schoolchildren, faggot.
ET1: The earthings only recognize - get this - 38 Mersenne prime numbers!!!
ET2: Prepare the battle cruisers.
Why not cure cancer? aids? anything?!?!? but sending radio signals to aliens in space is just plain stupid and a waste of time.
First of all, if you are looking for "intelligent" life, meaning more intelligent than us, chances are they will find us first, we wont have to search for more advanced life.
And primitive life? well they wouldnt have the technology to respond to radio signals, so what Seti really is searching for is human like life, on exactly the same technologicial level as us, the chances of finding this is 1 in billions literally do the math here.
So what is seti? A waste of time, and its equal to shouting in the jungle hoping you'll make friends with some wild animals, when in reality, none of them understand you and only run away from you, or attack you.
Like I said, theres much more important things to worry about than soundwaves in space and finding some aliens which may or may not be friendly and which are mostly as stupid as us.
Whats the point? If anyone can give me one reason why to donate resuorces to seti instead of the cancer cure research or aids cure, I'll give you a prize!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Its as much of a waste of resources as is running a pathetic benchmark program on your machine for days at a time just so you can have bragging rights.
Come on people, use these resources to cure cancer or something.
Seti is POINTLESS, even Seti knows Seti is pointless
Think about this, the search for intelligent life, with such pathetic technology as radio, please!! as if any alien would respond? Would we even respond if we started seeing alien signals in our crops? hell no we'd call it a hoax!!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The search for intelligent life? Ok lets say aliens saw our radio signals, either they'd laugh at us as we laugh at monkeys in the zoo, or they'd enslave us.
Really we dont want either of these situations ot happen, but really you make a good point, with nano technology and say brain to computer interface and AI, we wont be anything like what we are now, we will most likely be meta physical, most likely be able to transofrm matter into anything we want, most likely have telepathy via advanced communications technologies. If this is us in a few hundred years, then if we are looking for aliens that are millions of billions of years old, chances are they already know where we are and what we are doing and are laughing at us right now.
Think about it, anything thousands or millions of years more advanced than us would be like gods to us, literally.
Hopefully we dont end up attracting evil aliens who want to turn us into their pets
Giving aliens our DNA means, any group of aliens can simply use our DNA to look exactly like us and blend into our population and we would have no way of knowing it
of course idiots at seti and other fools who send stupid probes into space without thinking first, believe aliens will be as dumb as us and havent mastered what we dont understand.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Not only our DNA but maps to the solar system,
what kinda stupid idiot species gives out their own DNA and a MAP to their planet.
Ok walk into a dark alley and leave a knife, and a note saying where you live.
What are your chances that some killer is going to find this and walk right in your door and stab you?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No, that's entirely reasonable, but at any realistic range the signal is so weak that you'd need a bloody great big dish to concentrate that signal enough to "hear" it. I find it somewhat implausible that there are creatures that have evolved into radio telescopes :)
If they can construct a radio dish (even if they just use it like a reflecting telescope to shine the radio waves into their microwave "eyes" they'd presumably have to know at least a little geometry.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The point is that someone will pay attention if they suddenly get a string of numbers that is definitely non-random.
We'll save the formal introductions for later. As informal beginnings go, mathematics is probably the least-likely to get us incinerated on accident, I'd think.
Personally, I don't see how I can relieve human suffering by letting my computer sit idle, and frankly, I think of it as just a screensaver that's helping someone out.
I'll probably download Folding@Home, because frankly, I'm looking for the most artistically interesting one. So I don't have morals or compassion for the human race. So what? Have any of you thought what would happen if, say SETI@Home found something, and we got into a war with an alien species? We'd probably get our @$$e$ kicked, because we were too busy infighting and not concentrating on the task at hand (Starcraft's plot is kinda like this).
Of course, the whole 'Folding@Home looks like a good screensaver' thing might appease all of those people who want me to think of the children.
Will they be able to find the Blue Faery?
If you can figure out a way to cure cancer using wasted CPU cycles, I'll give you a prize! Do we have a deal? Sarcasm aside, if there truly is a way to do this, it indeed should be our first priority, but, correct me if I'm wrong, there is not. In the event that there is a way, it should definitely be a bigger deal than anyone is making it.
i wish i had read all the previous posts before this, heheh
I have been unable to find exactly what the "new" prime is, and was wondering if it fell between the current 37 and 38. If it did, it would be only the 38th, and the "old" 38 would be the "new" 39.
Our number system, our mathematics, and our primes may not be universally understood. They may merely be a convenient convention that we have constructed to make some sense out of our surroundings.
To blockquote Robert Pirsig from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
Sentient beings on another planet may have other constructs that work just as well for them, and are as rigorously true as ours -- only more convenient for their circumstances. Imagine how a two dimensional critter has a different idea of space than a three dimensional critter. Neither is wrong or right, only less or more useful to the beholder.
Perceptual differences will result in different interpretations of truth. One system's prime may be another system's non-prime.
ok i had to look it up a smiple search on google dont think that this as a troll just trying to help those that dont use googlem l:
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/mersenne.sht
"Many early writers felt that the numbers of the form 2n-1 were prime for all primes n, but in 1536 Hudalricus Regius showed that 211-1 = 2047 was not prime (it is 23.89). By 1603 Pietro Cataldi had correctly verified that 217-1 and 219-1 were both prime, but then incorrectly stated 2n-1 was also prime for 23, 29, 31 and 37. In 1640 Fermat showed Cataldi was wrong about 23 and 37; then Euler in 1738 showed Cataldi was also wrong about 29. Sometime later Euler showed Cataldi's assertion about 31 was correct.
Enter French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Mersenne stated in the preface to his Cogitata Physica-Mathematica (1644) that the numbers 2n-1 were prime for
n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127 and 257
and were composite for all other positive integers n 257. Mersenne's (incorrect) conjecture fared only slightly better than Regius', but still got his name attached to these numbers.
Definition: When 2n-1 is prime it is said to be a Mersenne prime.
It was obvious to Mersenne's peers that he could not have tested all of these numbers (in fact he admitted as much), but they could not test them either. It was not until over 100 years later, in 1750, that Euler verified the next number on Mersenne's and Regius' lists, 231-1, was prime. After another century, in 1876, Lucas verified 2127-1 was also prime. Seven years later Pervouchine showed 261-1 was prime, so Mersenne had missed this one. In the early 1900's Powers showed that Mersenne had also missed the primes 289-1 and 2107-1. Finally, by 1947 Mersenne's range, n 258, had been completely checked and it was determined that the correct list is:
n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 61, 89, 107 and 127.
Many ancient cultures were concerned with the relationship of a number with the sum of its divisors, often giving mystic interpretations. Here we are concerned only with one such relationship:
Definition: A positive integer n is called a perfect number if it is equal to the sum of all of its positive divisors, excluding n itself.
For example, 6 is the first perfect number because 6=1+2+3. The next is 28=1+2+4+7+14. The next two are 496 and 8128. These four were all known before the time of Christ. Look at these numbers in the following partially factored form:
2.3, 4.7, 16.31, 64.127.
Do you notice they all have the same form 2n-1(2n-1) (for n = 2, 3, 5, and 7 respectively)? And that in each case 2n-1 was a Mersenne prime? In fact it is easy to show the following theorems:
Theorem One: k is an even perfect number if and only if it has the form 2n-1(2n-1) and 2n-1 is prime. [Proof.]
Theorem Two: If 2n-1 is prime, then so is n. [Proof.]
So the search for Mersennes is also the search for even perfect numbers!
You may have also noticed that the perfect numbers listed above (6, 28, 496, 8128) all end with either the digit 6 or the digit 8--this is also very easy to prove (but no, they do not continue to alternate 6, 8, 6, 8,...). If you like that digit pattern, look at the first four perfect numbers in binary:
110
11100
111110000
1111111000000
(The binary digit pattern is a consequence of Theorem One.) It is not known whether or not there is an odd perfect number, but if there is one it is big! This is probably the oldest unsolved problem in all of mathematics.
When checking to see if a Mersenne number is prime, we usually first look for any small divisors. The following theorem of Euler and Fermat is very useful in this regard.
Theorem Three: Let p and q be primes. If q divides Mp = 2p-1, then
q = +/-1 (mod 8) and q = 2kp + 1
for some integer k. [Proof.]
Finally, we offer the following for your perusal:
Theorem Four. Let p = 3 (mod 4) be prime. 2p+1 is also prime if and only if 2p+1 divides Mp. [Proof].
Theorem Five. If you sum the digits of any even perfect number (except 6), then sum the digits of the resulting number, and repeat this process until you get a single digit, that digit will be one "
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The Gauss integers (denoted Z[i]) are a neat example of an alternative ring that has interesting implications for ordinary number theory. A Gauss integer is a complex number a+bi for which a and b are both integers.
Not all integer primes are Gauss primes: for example, 5 is a prime in the integers, but in the Gauss integers 5 = (2+i)(2-i). In fact, you can show that a prime p is also a Gauss prime if and only if p=3 mod 4, and otherwise p is the product of 2 complex conjugate Gauss primes (a+bi)(a-bi). This relates to the fact in normal number theory that any 1 mod 4 prime is expressible as the sum of 2 squares.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Does anybody know what the number actually is? And isn't it a bit odd that it hasn't shown up as news on either the GIMPS Home Page or the PrimeNet Home Page yet?
200,000 lightyears away is assuming these beings are limited to physics like we are, what if they have complete control of time space and matter? Then we'd be amusement for these ETs
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If people go cow tipping, they race dogs around tracks, they fight dogs, all for amusement, why cant aliens do the same to us?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
"Oh fuck. Those stupid humans are sending us another one of their primitive 'prime numbers'. Give it a rest you galactic radio-grafitti artists!"
http://network54.com/Hide/Forum/80065
Gaming forum anonymous
What we believe is true, is simply our best way of understanding something, but our limited senses of sight, hearing, smell and so on, limit us into what we can judge as true.
something which can see in 2d, we believe to be real, correct? What about things which we cant see,
If we see in 2d, we only see one side of an object, what about the other 2 sides? we can use math to predict and find the length of whats on these other two sides, but theres no way we can ever SEE whats on the other 2 sides.
Now consider this, an alien species which isnt even from this dimension, it would see from all sides, all angles, all at once, its view of the world would be TOTALLY diffrent than ours, its technology would be TOTALLY diffrent, and if we ever met up with such a force, we wouldnt even know its there, yet it would know exactly where EACH and every single one of us are.
So what we see as true, is only true in our OWN eyes, what something more intelligent sees as true, is true in its eyes as well as in our eyes.
Get it? An alien life form which has evolved beyond our dimension or which is simply beyond our dimension, can in theory see everything from every angle, if we met them we'd think God was talking to us, we'd here a voice come from the sky which simply speaks to us and because we are so stupid we may even worship this voice, write bibles and so on.
When That could have been first contact and we never realized it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
TINKER: Software Tools for Molecular Design
Version 3.8 October 2000
Copyright (c) Jay William Ponder 1990-2000
portions Copyright (c) Michael Shirts 2001
portions Copyright (c) Vijay S Pande 2001
What gives? Why so tight guys? Your attitude might get you through now, but the increasing awareness of computer security and user rights will leave you with few clients. It's strange to expect strangers to do things for you when you are not willing to share something so small as a distributed client source code.
That said, my machine will be sending results anyway. Better that they are used before they hit the scrap heap.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
1,000,000,000 Hours ago: The dawn of man
1,000,000,000 Mins ago: The Dawn of Christianity
1,000,000,000 Cokes ago
Yesterday Morning
Perhaps all of our scientists are on acid, because i got it from them
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac