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New Largest Known Prime Number: 2^57,885,161-1
An anonymous reader writes with news from Mersenne.org, home of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search: "On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on GIMPS volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, GIMPS — now in its 17th year — is the longest continuously-running global 'grassroots supercomputing' project in Internet history."
Actually it would be 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,160 times, minus 1.
Considering any number 2^n-1 is prime, this isn't too impressive, except for maybe that they bothered to expand it into a full number.
Oh look! I've discovered a new, larger prime! 2^57,885,162-1 What do I win?
Post responses of cool names.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
... if they didn't limit the search to just Mersenne primes.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You didn't read your link did you? There is no equation for prime numbers right now. There are some 'hacks' that work up to high prime numbers but no existing formula.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
So.... is there an equivalent to rc5stats for GIMPS, so we can compare, uh, our harnessed computing prowess?
No, I'm not going to google it. I want your opinion on whether it's any good or not.
Someone posted recently that slashdot editors intentionally add mistakes to summaries in order to get the replies going. Now I think they were right, but I still can't help myself.
257,885,160 is not a prime number, 2^57,885,161-1 is. Also, who says "less one" to mean "minus one"?
I dare you to write the whole number, including every digit. It shouldn't take up more than a few megabytes.
I know that that is called a Mersenne prime. Why do they always look for primes of that form? Are these numbers more likely to be prime? Why don't they start looking for primes of the form 2^n+1?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I thought the Slashdot summary goofed on this, but the scientists did as well.
It's the largest known Mersenne prime. For instance, 1000000! - 1 is also known to be prime, and it is much larger than this number.
Since the only known perfect numbers are derived from Mersenne Primes, this means there are also now 48 known perfect numbers. Interestingly, this property of Mersenne Primes was discovered by Euclid about 2000 years before Mersenne was born (time machine, anyone?). Finding a non-Mersenne perfect number would be a huge accomplishment.
Have you read my blog lately?
This
I wonder if 2^(2^57,885,161-1)-1 is also prime.
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those that don't."
This new number is 2^57,885,161 - 1, so naturally it has 57,885,161 digits, all of them 1. A simpler example: 2^5 - 1 is a Mersenne prime. Written in binary it's 100000 - 1 = 11111.
Oh! You meant that it has 17,425,170 decimal digits. Booooooooring!
wouldn't this be somewhat ideal to compute using GPUs, and substantially faster than CPUs?
Math Nazi's
Optimus Prime is bigger.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Now I have to find a new combination to my luggage. Again.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm just trying to weigh the energy consumption versus potential benefit. The GIMPS homepage does a terrible job of explaining why (I'm not suggesting that there is no reason to do this) and a linked FAQ is hardly better ( http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html ). Can anyone provide a better answer or instruct those running the GIMPS homepage to do so?
what exactly is its real significance here..can anyone explain as to the applications of the same. A license plate number ?
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
Yeah, it's better to get the math completely wrong.
Yet, all the math experts do understand the discovery(which none of them made).
Isn't this the essence of language. The summary and text of the news is not a proof, so as such, it should be treated as one.
All the wasted comments on who has the exact correct mathematical grammar and logic just shows how immature they are.
I bet most of them make minimum wage at a part time job. Good for them they are smarter than the new articles submitter.
I've got a problem with that WW meme.
In the movie, that was NOT WW's final judgement. It was a final test of Charlie's character. Charlie contested WW's brusque send-off and ended up owning a chocolate factory.
What kind of lesson is this teaching our kids?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Did they use this web page?
http://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/
That would kill the bear!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hey, don't believe everything you read on the Internet! I'm going to check this puppy out!
OK... 2^57885161 - 1 is not even.
2^57885161 - 1 is not divisible by 3.
2^57885161 - 1 is not divisible by 5.
Hmm... this might take a while.
57,885,161 bits requires nearly 7 megabytes to represent this number in binary form. Wow!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Yeah, it's better to get the math completely wrong.
Well, it's difficult to get the math partially wrong!
Ezekiel 23:20
Will prime number be a good bitcoin replacement? Bitcoin has a hard limit, which is not really how money works. Prime number seems to be ever increasing and hard to farm too.
This is not even slightly interesting unless you can print out a list of all the primes up to and including this number.
(Yes, I know that's a much harder problem than taking pot shots at the "largest known" prime number.)
I wonder what the energy use of this project has been? 17 years? How many megawatthours? And what would be the 'carbon footprint' ?
I bet you also tell athletes to stop running so that we can use air more efficiently.
What kind of luddite asks for something like this in the first place?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
2^100+1 is not divisible by 3.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
its an aesthetic discipline not an objectively useful one.
alot of it turns out to be useful, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years after its first 'discovery'.
Quaternions would be a perfect example, imaginary numbers another.
so right now we have no idea what the usefulness of finding high primes is.
but in 200 years it might allow us to calculate the control points necessary to create an anti-matter damper for protonium neon flux casings in hyperdimensional warp transferrence beam generators.
now lets imagine the energy consumed to create and power all of those factories in various quasi-modern countries (where building codes are substandard) and lets imagine all the enrgy consumed to ship it over seas on gigantic boats some of which sink then lets imagine all the energy to unload the boats then lets imagine the big trucks that move that stuff out over the country and then lets imagine all of the shopping outlets that the stuff goes into and lets imagine all the light, heat, water, etc, and all the power it takes to run those things and lets imagine what 'use' a shopping mall actually has. actually, none, which is why in the soviet era they probably didn't have "hot topic". the soviet era, however, was also massively inefficient and produced the worst environmental disasters in modern history many of them still secret, (other than whats happening in China, another communist country...)
so lets just stop bitching at everyone about what they use energy for and how 'wasteful' it is, unless you want to personally stop watching TV, stop eating meat, stop driving a car and having a job and just become homeless and live off of dumpster diving because that truly would be the most 'energy efficient' lifestyle (other than say being a hunter gatherer in the amazon forest - but alot of them have ipods and want to charge it. . . more 'waste' i guess).
Since many security systems are based on large prime numbers (e.g. SSL), I've always wondered if having a huge list of primes would weaken those system? Seems like it would have to unless I'm missing something.
Perhaps we could focus on a real world problem...
echo '2^57885161-1' | time bc | tee bigprime.txt | md5sum
What did you get ? (assumes BC_LINE_LENGTH=70 )
It's actually pretty easy to do in calculus!
17,425,170 *decimal* digits
I'd imagine the benefit per kilowatt-hour is far greater than the average TV set.
The next prime is somewhere between 2^57,885,161+1 and (2^57,885,161-1)! + 1. That prime is not necessarily in the form 2^x - 1.
2^57,885,163-1 Huh. Isn't *every* odd power of two minus 1 a prime number, in which case it makes it much less impressive to find a (2^(2N))-1 ?
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
Searching for Mersenne primes keeps my study warm in the winter.
No left turn unstoned.
It would be more accurate in the story to mention that Dr. Cooper is running the Mersenne Prime Search program across all of the systems in the computer labs at the University of Central Missouri, in Warrensburg, MO.
Mitchell and Webb anyone?
time (echo '2^57885161-1' | bc | tee bigprime.txt | md5sum)
f14d82090509a1cb1915c8aac26c6916 -
0.10s user 0.07s system 0% cpu 54:49.90 total