Slashdot Mirror
New Mersenne Prime Discovered, Largest Known Prime Number: 2^74,207,281 - 1 (mersenne.org)
Dave Knott writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits. The same GIMPS software recently uncovered a flaw in Intel's latest Skylake CPUs, and its global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. The prime is almost 5 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 49th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find.
There is a US$3000 award for the finder.
And a $3000 power bill for those who don't find it.
The number is 2^74,207,281-1, thus its exactly 74,207,280 bits long and all those bits are 1. That's 9,275,910 bytes, or roughly 9MiB. When talking about mersenne primes on a tech site, using base 10 versions encoded as ascii (or utf-8, its the same for that subset) seems like an odd measure of size.
There are only 49 of these known. I don't see how it can be used in encryption.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Uninteresting fact.
If 2^n-1 is represented in binary then n will be the number of set bits.
That means that if n can be divided by m then 2^n-1 can be divided by 2^m-1. (For example 2^15-1 = 32767 and can be divided by 2^3-1 and 2^5-1.)
From the headline we can tell that 74,207,281 is a prime, otherwise 2^74,207,281-1 wouldn't be a prime.
I wanna be a perfect number!
I'd rather be happy than perfect.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.