(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.

Comments

Folding your Distributed Computing

[joshamania]

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!!!

Re:just think

[erlando]

Some of us do use our otherwise wasted idle-cycles for something useful:

Cancer drug research
Gene research
Protein folding

All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET or cracking RC-5.