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New Possible Record Prime Number Found
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."
Aha 10 million digits may be easy to store, but deviding that number by other number lower than half that number to prove it is actually a prime number isn't really that easy.
I assume (hope)there are other ways of proving primeness than brute forcing it by doing lots of divisions of series' of incredibly large numbers just to find the one that won't devide evenly.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Okay, so I made that up. But how are they going to prove it's a prime? And, more importantly, does it taste good?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Exactly my thoughts.