SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the how-many-bits-required-to-represent-that-solution? dept.
New largest known prime number found:
RALEIGH, NC., January 3, 2018 -- The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 277,232,917-1, having 23,249,425 digits. A computer volunteered by Jonathan Pace made the find on December 26, 2017. Jonathan is one of thousands of volunteers using free GIMPS software available at www.mersenne.org/download/.
The new prime number, also known as M77232917, is calculated by multiplying together 77,232,917 twos, and then subtracting one. It is nearly one 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 50th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 16 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a cash award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the largest known primes, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes.
The primality proof took six days of non-stop computing on a PC with an Intel i5-6600 CPU. To prove there were no errors in the prime discovery process, the new prime was independently verified using four different programs on four different hardware configurations.
- Aaron Blosser verified it using Prime95 on an Intel Xeon server in 37 hours.
- David Stanfill verified it using gpuOwL on an AMD RX Vega 64 GPU in 34 hours.
- Andreas Höglund verified the prime using CUDALucas running on NVidia Titan Black GPU in 73 hours.
- Ernst Mayer also verified it using his own program Mlucas on 32-core Xeon server in 82 hours. Andreas Höglund also confirmed using Mlucas running on an Amazon AWS instance in 65 hours.
Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years. The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award.
I once had Pi (π) memorized to 200 decimal places, but that has fallen to only 120 digits. What mathematical/numerical oddity/skill do you have?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday January 05 2018, @08:46AM (1 child)
Of course the power bill of keeping his various computers running the last 14 years may easily be $3,360. And that is assuming a modest $20/month for a single mid range PC. Remember, the PC is not idle during the time it runs the program... Most likely it is maxing the CPU which is a big draw, so $20/month may be an understatement.
Assuming a draw of 250watts... (not unlikely for a computer with an active CPU and probably light)
8760 hours/year = 2190 kWh annually...
10.42 cents per kWh (national average in 2015) x14yr... $3194.77 electric bill
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @09:10AM
Anyone doing it for the monetary reward is an idiot anyway. Consider all of the people who ran the prime-finding programs but didn't find anything yet -- overall, this is almost certainly several orders of magnitude less profitable than gambling, or even lottery.
I'd say that the hunt is being done more for the bragging rights, and the $3k seems more like a token gesture. Of course, "I found the largest known prime" counts as bragging in a very limited subset of the population; "... and won $3k" is a nice way to expand the brag to non-geek friends and family :)