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."

Comments

Re:/.ed

[smartdreamer]

Thanks for the link.

Their is a couple explanations there, but none of them gives a good reason. Thet are

• Tradition Tradition as never been a real reason to continue something ; only what inspired the tradition could.
• For the by-products of the quest Comparing prim computation with space odessy is a little bit exagerated. The FFT trick, for example, as also been found in other area.
• People collect rare and beautiful items Laughable. You cannot try to establish a comparison with fundamental scientific quest and put it side by side with this "argument". And I did't know that inifinit abstractions are rare.
• For the glory Glory as to come from acheivement, and this what am I looking for here.
• To test the hardware Like it was the only or the best hardware test. Sure you can compare (in a limited view) computer speed with a prim computation test. But, do we need bigger prims number? I think not.
• To learn more about their distribution Unless you can't compute every numbers, you don't bring anything worth to mathematics because their is enough data now. What we miss is a theory.
• For the Challenge Let say it is similar to "for glory". Everything can be done "for the challenge".
• For the Money Ah! There we are : money. But the question I raised was to find a purpose to this "quest" and to find out why somebody would give money to such thing. So this would be a circular reasoning.

So to resume this, could I say it is a tradition taken from dead people they transformed into a "challenge" for glory justified by money and addressed to "people who likes to collect rare (infinite) things" and supposedly meant to help without knowing how except for the by-products of the quest?

Sorry, I'm sceptical today...