(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

Grammar Goldmine

[cpeterso]

"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. "

Re:Grammar Goldmine

[ConceptJunkie]

Oh, come on, pointing out grammar and spelling errors is like shooting fish in a barrel... and it's a barrel packed with sardines. And you have a cannon.

It's obvious people like Hemos don't care about speaking proper English, or they are so hyped up on caffeine or kernel code or whatever and make an outrageous number of typos. Anyhow, pointing out the problems just seems to waste bandwidth. I suggest we all just sit back relax and float downstream and enjoy the stories and discussion.

It's not worth "loosing" your cool.

Waste of resources

[atrowe]

Just thinking about all the time, money, and CPU power that went into this disgusts me. While a prime number with 3,500,000 digits might have a nice cool factor, it is completely useless for any practical purposes.

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.

Seti is stupid and pointless, Why waste resources?

[HanzoSan]

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!

Why not HELP people, this is a waste

[HanzoSan]

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 ,they only do it because they get paid to do it, and because people are dumb enough to give up free resources to them.

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!!