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: 5, Touché) by BsAtHome on Friday January 05 2018, @07:45AM (8 children)
I, as a computer guy, count from zero. Much to the frustration of all "normal" people.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday January 05 2018, @10:32AM
I suppose if you want to count 30 seconds, it's worth marking when the time-interval begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:33PM (5 children)
You, a computer guy, also only count up to 1.
Please share more thrilling episodes of your life. Let me guess, it's hard living in a world with sub-150 IQ humans but you struggle bravely?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @07:34PM (4 children)
As somebody with an IQ dick power level somewhere in the neighborhood of 160...
Let me try again.
No, I cannot even. Who let some sub-150 IQ AC on to Soylent?!
Yes, I'm new here....
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday January 05 2018, @07:48PM
Let's see … the set of real numbers is a neighbourhood of 160. So you just stated that your IQ is some real number. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by new here on Friday January 05 2018, @09:37PM (2 children)
Don't listen to this AC, please. I am new here, and I will not stand idly by why others put words in my mouth. Cheeriou :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Friday January 05 2018, @11:19PM (1 child)
Judging by your UID, you've been waiting several years to deploy that joke*. Bet you posted the AC yourself because you were tired of waiting.
* So, not really all that new, here.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 06 2018, @04:09PM
No, if you click on the username, you can clearly see he/she hasn't been waiting to make the joke: he/she has already made the joke half a dozen times previously.
Obviously a regular user who just logs into that account to make that joke whenever someone says the phrase "new here."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @03:49PM
Are you the same sadist who sorts his files by binary code number, meaning that "iPhone" must always come after "Zune", and allows a dozen different files named "Ambiguous" with slightly different capitalizations, unlike any normal person would expect or do?
Anyway, thank you so much for all those unnecessary off by one errors. I hate your guts. :P
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @08:02AM (1 child)
I just thought of an even larger prime, a very elegant one! Text box too small to contain it. Will post later.
(Score: 4, Touché) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 05 2018, @12:53PM
Unfortunately, unlike with Fermat, I assume this won't be the last AC post...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Friday January 05 2018, @08:17AM
$3,000/(168 x 52 x 14)= 2.45 cents per hour.
it was worth it.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @08:21AM (2 children)
Two of the largest Mersenne primes [wikipedia.org] were discovered on Intel hardware compromised by the Meltdown vulnerability.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday January 05 2018, @10:36AM (1 child)
...and?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:28PM
And it took everyone 30% longer to validate it and will take 30% longer than the X amount of time it took, on top of the non-linear complexity of the calcuation to figure it out.
That means Christmas will be early this year! Upgrade now! That new intel CPU generation that was just released is now fully the same speed of the old generation -- which just got 30% slower overnight!
(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 :)
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday January 05 2018, @09:10AM (1 child)
Number theory - of which primes are an important component - is fun. Pi to 200 digits? No, sorry, only 45.
I participate in the international math-and-logic games. This is international, run in four rounds: qualifier, local quarter-finals, national semi-finals, and international finals in Paris. Although you can take part in almost any language (the problems are translated), the competition is originally French. Which means, typical France, the organizers cannot be bothered with a decent internet presence in other languages. Actually, even in French, the online info sucks. But the competition is fun, the problems are fun, and you meet like-minded math nuts along the way. FWIW, here's the Swiss site (German/French), [www.fsjm.ch] and the Canadian site [ulaval.ca].
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 06 2018, @02:30AM
Number theory is to STEM college students as basic algebra is to Black high-schoolers, utterly a waste of time to all but the 1% who will actually use it later in life.
More colleges need to have 2 different courses of undergrad discrete math -- one for people who give a flying fuck about bullshit like proofs and set theory, and one for people who want to learn practical skills.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @11:31AM
I can fart pi to 9 decimal places. But only after eating pie. I once attempted 10 decimal places, but had to change my trousers soon after.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @12:41PM (1 child)
"in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 50th known Mersenne prime ever discovered"
These numbers are so rare that they're on the endangered species list. There used to be large herds (or was it flocks?) of them in the wild, but they were hunted down by man for their prized unicorn horns. Now, they are never seen in the wild, only paintings of them in museums. One has never been photographed, as far we know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @07:43PM
I remember when whole sets of Mersenne primes--hundreds of thousands of them from one limit to the other as far as the eye could see--used to roam the positive integer field. It was a sight to behold.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 05 2018, @12:51PM (2 children)
I can only remember like two dozen places to get good pie and I'd have to think about the second dozen for a few minutes.
I don't have any special mathematical quirks. Hell, I don't even remember half of the math I learned in school because I've never once used it outside of school. I can, however, relearn anything I find a need to know about as fast as I can google it up.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
I only get to sample the wife's pie these days, and only in the evening on weekends.
I used to like when a lady would show up at my apartment with a warm pie. Sometimes she'd bring a friend and we'd all be sharing her pie that night. My favorite was probably sweet, sweet cherry but the girls preferred savory with meat deep inside. Often Greek style.
Nice cup cakes too!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 06 2018, @02:33AM
So her pussy had the look, feel, and smell of a Gyro? That's probably the most accurate description of a vagina I've ever read, right down to the natural yogurt-making ability.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Justin Case on Friday January 05 2018, @02:35PM (1 child)
277,232,917-1 is the combination to my luggage!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 05 2018, @08:00PM
23 million digits is a great way to defeat the $5 wrench...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday January 05 2018, @03:52PM (5 children)
I can count to five....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:29PM (1 child)
Xeon server occurs twice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Friday January 05 2018, @05:28PM
Yes, And most Amazon AWS servers are Xeon-based, too, but there's a huge range of Xeons of differing architectures, core/thread counts, clock speeds and ranges, capability flags, and what have you.
Any given three Xeons, unless the exact same model in the exact same spec system, represent three differing hardware configurations.
If the configuration is different (to whatever degree), it's a different configuration. Honestly, I don't even see this as pedantic (though opinions of course may vary); it's a sesame street skill. How many different shapes? five.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 05 2018, @05:47PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 05 2018, @06:11PM (1 child)
Well, they said four programs, and I count four (prime95, GPUOwl, CUDALucas, and MLucas). They said four hardware configurations, and I count five (Blosser's, Stanfill's, Höglund's NVidia, Mayer's, and Höglund's AWS).
I figure surely if someone can count prime numbers up into the twenty-three million digit range, it's not unreasonable to hold a journalist covering them to the standard of "can count to five."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 05 2018, @11:26PM
I count four hardware configurations. Blosser and Mayer were both using Intel Xenon. Höglund maybe as well.
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Friday January 05 2018, @04:24PM (4 children)
Now that they have discovered yet again the largest known number what use do they put it to? Anyone?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Justin Case on Friday January 05 2018, @04:41PM
Very time-saving use: in the search for the next prime you can skip everything less than 277,232,917-1.
That's a lot of territory!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 05 2018, @04:43PM
None. Unless you count torturing Math Majors.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 05 2018, @05:50PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Saturday January 06 2018, @12:03AM
I say bring on the elliptic curves.