Largest Known Prime Number Discovered

DooKey

DooKey

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The largest known prime number has been discovered by a FedEx employee from Tennessee. He did this running the GIMPS distributed computing client on an Intel Core i5-6600. The new prime is 23M digits long and is 1M digits larger than the previous prime. That's one heck of a LONG number. Further, this is just one example of how distributed computing running on your PC can further academic research in fields like mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and other fields. If you want to use the spare cycles from your cpu, but don't know what to do, go to our Distributed Computing forum and hook up with the guys and gals there. They will be glad to get you started computing for humanity!

The quest to find more prime numbers may seem frivolous, but they hold practical applications as well, such as the generation of public key cryptography algorithms, hash tables, and as random number generators. Further work into primes could also tell us a bit more about mathematics and why it’s so damned good at describing the universe. And as Carl Sagan speculated in Contact, transmitting streams of consecutive primes could also be used as a way of saying “hello” to an alien civilization.
 
There is just one question about this that needs to be answered: why do we need to know this?
 
You said "Carl Sagan".... HAHAHA.

"We are all made of star stuff"

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

That being said... sweet.
 
While the value of these types of projects are not to be underestimated or undermined, to be fair he didn't discover anything. Someone else wrote the algorithm, his computer did all the work, and other people verified it. All he did was download a program and hit go.

More power to him for using the spare cycles though, they're always a welcome source of help.
 
While I don't think this is a waste of resources, it was far more than a single I5. currently there are 1.6 million CPU's with a computing power of 340,000 teraflops active on GIMPS
 
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motomonkey said:
While I don't think this is a waste of resources, it was far more than a single I5. currently there are 1.6 million CPU's with a computing power of 340,000 teraflops active on GIMPS
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Seems odd to attribute it to one guy if that's the case. So what happened...a bunch of other people did most of the work and his machine just did the final piece, or what?
 
MavericK said:
Seems odd to attribute it to one guy if that's the case. So what happened...a bunch of other people did most of the work and his machine just did the final piece, or what?
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Its like a bunch of distributed computing, you are assigned a problem to work on from the work server. each discreet cpu thread of sufficient power (faster than 1.4 Ghz) is assigned a problem to solve.
 
motomonkey said:
Its like a bunch of distributed computing, you are assigned a problem to work on from the work server. each discreet cpu thread of sufficient power (faster than 1.4 Ghz) is assigned a problem to solve.
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I understand how it works (generally), but I guess I am curious as to why this guy was credited. Did his machine calculate out the whole thing or no?
 
Some Irony here that people on this forum are not more familiar with GIMPS, considering most of the users here have probably used Prime95 at one time or another. Prime95 is the program GIMPS uses to solve Mersene primes. :)
 
Can any theoretical mathematicians on the forum please explain the significance of searching for ever larger prime numbers? In what way is this actually beneficial to anything, other than satiating the curiosity of a few mathematicians?
 
MavericK said:
I understand how it works (generally), but I guess I am curious as to why this guy was credited. Did his machine calculate out the whole thing or no?
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Yes, it's then double checked on other machines. the actual problems are assigned by the work server. he should be up for an award for this, $3000.

There is a standing award of $150,000 for the first 100 million digit prime to be solved, so, it's not just a cool thing to do.
 
MavericK said:
I understand how it works (generally), but I guess I am curious as to why this guy was credited. Did his machine calculate out the whole thing or no?
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His computer calculated it. I think a few "quick" checks are done to see if it can be a prime. It was then sent off to be verified and was verified by multiple sources.

The new record-holding prime number, dubbed “M77232917,” was discovered by Jonathan Pace, a 51-year-old electrical engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee, on December 26, 2017. It was discovered as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a group that does exactly what its name implies. Mersenne primes—named after the 17th century French monk Marin Mersenne—are a rare class of primes that are one less than a power of two, expressed as Mn=2n-1. In this case, the new prime was calculated by multiplying the number two 77,232,917 times and then subtracting one (277,232,917-1). The new prime is the 50th known Mersenne prime.
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Funny thing about Mersenne primes is that they are very few and far between.

As far as I am aware, there isn't anything looking for regular large prime numbers.

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I don't have the computing power, but I did make a program that can use up to 2^32 threads to calculate primes. Starts acting strange on a hex core CPU at around 40k threads. But you really only want 1 thread per available CPU thread anyway so it doesn't really matter.

Add a large number library to it and it could theoretically calculate and verify any prime possible given enough time and resources.

Maybe I should go for that 150k prize for a 100M digit prime.
 
motomonkey said:
Some Irony here that people on this forum are not more familiar with GIMPS, considering most of the users here have probably used Prime95 at one time or another. Prime95 is the program GIMPS uses to solve Mersene primes. :)
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When I hear gimps, I think of some weirdo in a leather suit and mask. Like that dude from pulp fiction.
 
MavericK said:
I understand how it works (generally), but I guess I am curious as to why this guy was credited. Did his machine calculate out the whole thing or no?
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Most likely it was his client that turned in the result. This is probably the incentive for people to join this distributed network pool.
 
23m digits, so if you typed this in it's equal to approximately 6900 pages of numbers.
 
WhoMe said:
Prime numbers and public key encryption pdf: https://math.berkeley.edu/~kpmann/encryption.pdf

edit: also there is a $250,000 prize for the first to discover a billion digit prime number--get busy!
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Hrmmm... very interesting. Large number library will be coming to my program. It shouldn't affect the backend at all. The only thing it lacks is the ability to process numbers larger than 2^64 without having a large number library.

Guessing a large number library will slow it down a bit compared to regular calculations, but there really isn't any other option.
 
cyclone3d said:
Hrmmm... very interesting. Large number library will be coming to my program. It shouldn't affect the backend at all. The only thing it lacks is the ability to process numbers larger than 2^64 without having a large number library.

Guessing a large number library will slow it down a bit compared to regular calculations, but there really isn't any other option.
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Yeah, one that's well optimized, there are a fair number around. Haven't played with any in while myself.
 
If this was calculated using obviously compromised intel processors, i dispute this finding and demand to see the proof calculated by hand. /s
 
You have to understand what people mean when they talk about the longest numbers.

You could simple keep just writing down big numbers... they even have special notation for it since writing it down even with just using basic scientific notation would take too long.

You need to ask what is the largest number that REPRESENTS something.

That crown goes to... Graham's number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham's_number - "As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number. And so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot even be expressed in this way by power towers"

That's a huge number that actually has a meaning... put that in your pipe and smoke it.
 
dgingeri said:
a 23 million digit prime, though?
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It's always a good idea to stay ahead of the crackers...but I believe quantum computing may obsolete a lot of this (but I don't get quantum computing, I have a non-quantum brain that understands binary logic).
 
umeng2002 said:
You have to understand what people mean when they talk about the longest numbers.

You could simple keep just writing down big numbers... they even have special notation for it since writing it down even with just using basic scientific notation would take too long.

You need to ask what is the largest number that REPRESENTS something.

That crown goes to... Graham's number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham's_number - "As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number. And so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot even be expressed in this way by power towers"

That's a huge number that actually has a meaning... put that in your pipe and smoke it.
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I'll call your Graham's number and raise you all in TREE(3). :eek:
 
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