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

Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

This breakthrough will ... erm, wait ... I know this. This will help us ... Err... Erm, err... 9/11?

Re:/.ed

[OverlordQ]

10 million digits in 15 bytes? think you're off by a couple orders of magnitude there. We're talking 10 million *digits* the number 10 million.

Re:Why prime numbers ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There may actually be a practical result of this research eventually;

Excuse me, but this project it totally useless!

Trying to do what? Find the biggest possible prime number?
It is well known that there are infinite primes, so what you learn by finding yet a bigger one? nothing? ...and you don't even know how many primes were between this and the last one!

Now, making a list of ALL numbers, starting from 1 and going up one by one, that sure might be handy. That is maths. That is sience.
What those people do is child game.

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...

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about finding the number 654964169+153419/794987984979*/8719879879181654698 735468719176546468468768461814614?

seriously - find a better way to power our cars, or find a faster way to download porn. Finding a long-ass number that is divisible by itself and whatever the hell else are the criteria for a prime number is useless.