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New Possible Record Prime Number Found

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the my-number-is-bigger-than-yours dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project, has probably found a new record prime number. Two verification runs have started; no errors were found in the initial calculation. The number of primes found lately, four in just over two years, is higher than previously expected. This prime is just under 10 million digits, which means that one of the participants in the project makes a good chance to obtain his or her part of the EFF prize of $100,000 for the first prime of over 10 million digits in the coming months. In 2000, one of the Gimps participants collected the $50,000 reward offered."

4 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. /.ed by dascandy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Their computers can calculate a prime number with 10,000,000 digits, but they can't even serve a webpage? Jeez... where are your priorities?

    1. Re:/.ed by meringuoid · · Score: 5, Funny
      Their computers can calculate a prime number with 10,000,000 digits, but they can't even serve a webpage?

      Ah, but... a number of ten million digits? That has to take up ~ 10MB of disk space. And now the link's been posted to /., where every lunatic is now clicking on it and thinking that by some bizarre geek savant superpower they're going to somehow look at it and go 'yup, that's prime all right' or something...

      No wonder the server's a smoking crater now :)

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  2. Why anything? by Poromenos1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why do people calculate digits of pi? Why do they scale mt. Everest? Because they have small penises.

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  3. New Possible Record Prime Number Found by anshil · · Score: 5, Funny

    Smallest Positive Mersenne Prime-Number ever: 3

    Hey, also small is beatuiful.

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