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(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?
...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
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*
ugh
I think I'll stop here.
Yes, and we're all awaiting your proposal for how to use a bunch of idle PCs and bandwidth to wipe out hatred, poverty, disease, and environmental destruction.
Until you get back to us with that, stop complaining about how we entertain ourselves, okay?
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
That in spite of all the bad things happening, people can give all those who would tear them down the middle finger, and continue on in purely academic research?
I think PART of humanity has advanced, but those who:
a) cause misery
b) profit off misery
c) whine about misery
haven't really gotten anywhere.
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.
Uh huh. How many CPU cycles does it take to synthesize a pizza, eh?
If you want to make a distributed project to use spare CPU cycles to design new pharmaceuticals, engineer new food crops, or anything else that's "useful", go ahead. Otherwise piss off.
By the way, it may not be obvious to you, but the only problems that can be attacked using distributed computing are those that we can figure out how to split up into large numbers of mostly-independent, completely algorithmic subproblems.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
... 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.
If you can't do the time, don't do the prime.
(snort, snicker, guffaw, I can die a happy man now)
I think PART of humanity has advanced, but those who:
a) cause misery
b) profit off misery
c) whine about misery
haven't really gotten anywhere.
You forgot:
d) crow about how smart they are and squander their energy on trivialities.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
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.
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.
"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.
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...
All the worlds problems solved, just like that!
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.
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Come on, give it up, that's
Big karma for some lucky geek, no doubt.
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...
If the number is off by one, it will trivially not be prime as it will be divisible by 2.
Also, transmitting this number in binary is rather simple, since it is just a series of 1s!
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
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.
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?
Greg Bear's The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars discuss this idea. Ships are designed for stealth, and Bad Things happen to a certain planet whose inhabitants weren't careful to shield their radio transmissions.
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 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.
Remember, even primes have two factors!
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
The thing is though, there is a value in creating communities that in large part cut across national lines and provide interconnectedness between people. Distribued computing projects can aid in this type of social growth.
For those of you are complaining about this being a waste of time and resources, why not back up your indignation by personally making an online donation to the charity of your choice. Quit complaining about people having fun wasting less money and resources than they (collectively) probably waste on cigarettes, and do something yourself to make the world a better place.