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42nd Mersenne Prime Confirmed
Jazzer_Techie writes "The possible Mersenne Prime discovered last week has now been confirmed. This prime has 7,816,230 digits, which makes it not only the largest Mersenne Prime, but also the largest prime of any kind ever discovered. For those who don't want to take time to read the article, the prime is 2^25,964,951 - 1."
I'm not trying to be a troll here, but of what possible value is a really big prime number? Is there any practical value to it, or is it just an interesting bit of trivia?
The FAQ for this endeavor can be seen here.
One glaring ommission from the FAQ is "Why participate in this?" I guess if you have to ask why, there's no point in asking.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Ok, now that we've finally found prime numbers so ridiculously large as to never have any practical purpose within any of our lifetimes, can we stop running the GIMPS screen saver, and move over all that computational power to something that might actually help mankind (within our lifetimes, even)?
e ensaver
No, not SETI@home (which is about as useful as GIMPS), can't folks please switch to something like the UD/NFCR "Screensaver Lifesaver" that processes some various highly computationally intensive biological problems (ligand fitting, etc.) related to a number of issues (these are directed at cancer research, specifically):
- http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html
- http://www2.nfcr.org/site/PageServer?pagename=scr
- http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but when I hear of all the people running GIMPS, SETI@home, etc. etc., I feel a tiny bit sad that maybe all those unused cycles could be used towards something more useful, but not as sexy...