
GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number - seycombi
https://www.mersenne.org/primes/press/M77232917.html
======
imhelpingu
So _that 's_ what it's working on when it's starting up.

~~~
lettergram
I know typically jokes like this aren't HN material, but have an up vote lol

Literally, the first thing I though of was GIMP as well :)

~~~
sillysaurus3
Mm, if something is subtly funny, it's usually welcome.

One of my favorite jokes of all time was pg's nickb april fools prank:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109#152361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109#152361)

Probably worth putting together a list of HN moments... There were so many.

~~~
lettergram
Reading over that, I actually recognize I miss the older HN - where the
conversations seemed fairly long and in depth. It's still often the case, but
it does seem like the average length and depth is decreasing.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I completely agree. There are a few contributing factors, none of which are
unsolvable. But it seems like the way to solve it is to essentially fork HN.

The current plan is to create a "mirror" of HN's front page, but with a
smaller community. You'll be bale to keep your HN name, because you won't be
allowed to use someone's existing HN name on the new site unless you claim it.

Then, we'll need content. This was the secret sauce in the early HN days. The
sole reason for people to come to the new site would be good conversation, and
I think recruiting a few of the writers from HN would be enough to bootstrap
it. Part of HN's early success was that pg actually participated in HN.
Whereas the current mod team just shows up to beat us over the head and little
else.

If you want to help plan this out, contact me (email's in profile). I think we
have a shot at this. Some past thoughts on the topic:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16064078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16064078)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044466)

Getting away from the heavy-handed moderation will be the best part. Comments
will be free to flow into tangents, as long as they're substantive.

~~~
voltagex_
What did the mod team do to you? This is the second time I've seen you have a
go at them today.

------
cjbprime
> 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.

What a great story.

~~~
ng-user
I know he's a volunteer but only $3000? Does that seem low to anyone else?

~~~
bmm6o
For producing something of no intrinsic monetary value?

~~~
nikanj
How are these any different from say Bitcoin?

~~~
cc81
You can buy things with Bitcoin.

~~~
skykooler
You can buy things with $3000 cash as well.

~~~
hossbeast
But not a Bitcoin

------
netcraft
so I didn't know this, but got curious about how many known prime there are -
I knew there were infinite primes, but thought that there would be some
concrete list of all the primes that we had discovered somewhere - but
apparently not

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-
pri...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-prime-
numbers-are-known)

> Nobody's really keeping count. ... There are very many hundred-digit primes
> to find. We could cover the Earth in harddisks full of distinct hundred-
> digit primes to a height of hundreds of meters, without even making a dent
> in the supply of hundred-digit primes.

~~~
OscarCunningham
I also used to think that there weren't very many primes. But the prime number
theorem says that the number of primes less than n is about n/log(n). The
function log doesn't grow very fast, so a large proportion of numbers are
prime. For example the number of primes less than 10^100 is 4*10^97.

Primes are really really common.

~~~
soVeryTired
Much more common than square numbers, for example. sum(1/n^2) converges, but
sum(1/p) for p prime doesn't.

------
jcoffland
tl;dr The 50th Mersenne prime was just found by a volunteer of the GIMPS
(Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is 2^77,232,917-1 and has
23,249,425 digits. Mersenne primes are extremely rare and are always of the
form 2^p-1 for some positive integer p. The first four Mersenne primes are 3,
7, 31, and 127.

~~~
meta_AU
Also, p is prime.

~~~
dansunciel
Just to clarify, in this case p = 77,232,917 is prime, but for Mersenne primes
in general p is just a positive integer.

~~~
meta_AU
Not quite. If p isn't prime then 2^p - 1 isn't prime.

------
WhitneyLand
But why?

One answer is a bit buried in a sub link in the article. On that page, you’ll
find arguments for the following reasons: tradition, by products of the quest,
collection of rare mathematical things, glory, pushing hardware performance,
and contest rewards.

Personally I’m forced to admit I enjoy seeing them found while being unable to
form any cogent justification.

[http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html](http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html)

~~~
vortico
That's actually a fairly complete and accurate list of reasons for such a
project. If I was interested, I'd do it for about half of those reasons, and
others may prefer the other half.

------
dghughes
Prime numbers are amazing.

I was watching a math documentary and one example was a Cicada in North
Carolina that only emerges once every thirteen years millions of them at once.
It's a defense mechanism the sheer number overwhelms predators. The Cicada
does this also to avoid appearing when another species of Cicada appears to
prevent cross breeding.

The other species in the same region emerges every 7 years. The two will only
emerge at the same time every 220 years (I think it as).

Smart bugs!

~~~
sidhack
Is this the 3-part BBC documentary - "The Code"?

~~~
dghughes
Yes I think that's what it is.

------
masterdev8
Is there a web service where you can buy a large number with certain length?
Not a Mersenne prime, but just a number and/or a prime?

It needs to comply with the 2^n-1 formula. Let's say I want a number long 100
000 000 or even 1 000 000 000 long. Or a prime above that length.

Do you know how much would that cost per number prime and non-prime?

------
votepaunchy
January looks to be a good month for discovering large prime numbers! As a
former contributor to the project it would be great to have a primer on the
best way to contribute today, covering the options for CPUs vs GPUs and the
various projects for factorizations vs primality tests.

------
jbgreer
TIL I work at the same company as the discoverer of the 50th known Mersenne
Prime.

I know at least one sysadmin who used GIMPS as a burn-in program for new
servers.....

~~~
chrismorgan
It’s common for stress-testing overclocking, too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95#Use_for_stress_testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95#Use_for_stress_testing)

~~~
wanderfowl
I use Prime95 to test for usage-related recording lags for sound and video
recording in our lab equipment. If we're not getting signal de-synchronization
with that slamming the CPU(s), we can worry a bit less.

------
ambivalents
As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain
why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically
interesting)

~~~
cortesoft
The link has another link to a page describing why this matters:

[http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html](http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html)

~~~
biot

      > Mersennes are beautiful and have some surprising applications.
    

Unfortunately that page doesn’t elaborate on what these surprising
applications are, which is itself surprising on a page that purports to answer
“why”.

~~~
schoen
It automatically results in the discovery of a new perfect number. :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%E2%80%93Euler_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%E2%80%93Euler_theorem)

(combining two of history's greatest mathematicians with names that have
confused generations of students by being pronounced very differently)

~~~
Cyph0n
Euler and Gauss are (for now, at least) in my opinion the greatest
mathematicians of the past two millenia (1000-1999, 2000-). Al-Khawarizmi
takes the cake for the millennium before that. Then it's Euclid all the way
back ;)

~~~
jacobolus
We know almost nothing about Euclid: we can figure out when he was active to
within a century or two, and according to Pappus writing 500 years later some
of his students/followers lived in Alexandria where Apollonius studied with
them. That’s pretty much it for biographical details.

The earliest remaining editions of the _Elements_ have no author mentioned,
and our source that Euclid compiled it is a brief remark from Proclus 700
years later. Most of what is in the Elements was results from earlier, and
it’s all but impossible to break down which bits were first done when or by
whom. Most of what we can see today of the _Elements_ or Euclid’s other books
is later copies, much of it probably added/changed/reordered/... later.

If you want a 2000-year-old idol, go for Archimedes.

In the last 1000 years, the most influential mathematician is surely Newton,
with an honorable mention for Leibniz. For the computer age (from 1950 through
the upcoming few centuries), I’d put my vote on Grassmann (1809–1877), though
his work was long ahead of its time and still substantially underappreciated.

Euler and Gauss were of course both brilliant and prolific and well worth
studying, along with Descartes, Lagrange, Riemann, Poincaré, ....

------
sohkamyung
Curious: can bitcoin mining rigs be modified for BOINC projects (GIMPS,
Seti@Home, etc.)? If yes, than I might invest in some rigs and modify them to
run BOINC.

Yes, I'm weird: I prefer to do computation for BOINC than for bitcoin. :-)

~~~
tribby
nowadays bitcoin mining rigs use ASICs that are optimized for the task, so I
don't think that would be a good idea.

on a general purpose system you can use GPUs and BOINC with SETI, not sure
about GIMPS.

~~~
sohkamyung
I see. Thanks.

I do have some PC systems but they are shared among family members, making it
difficult to run BOINC as a background task without interfering with their
work.

I'll look at low-cost systems, like the Raspberry Pi, to see if I can use them
as dedicated BOINC boxes instead.

~~~
schoen
Indeed, Bitcoin ASICs are not only "optimized" for the Bitcoin mining task
(computing a particular hash function), they usually literally don't include
the logic to perform other general-purpose computations at all! That's a big
contrast with GPUs.

There have been interesting discussions about a cryptocurrency whose proof of
work task would be something in some way more interesting or more useful than
partial hash collisions, but I don't think many such systems have caught on.
There is a prime-related one called Primecoin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin)

So, I guess that's a precedent for creating new cryptocurrency designs that do
something else. I don't know if there's a way to make any of the BOINC tasks
into cheap-to-verify PoW systems or if anyone's tried to do so, but that might
be a cool project.

------
mwilliaams
Is there actually any use to discovering ever-larger prime numbers?

~~~
kss238
Cryptography

~~~
B-Con
There's no cryptographic use in finding a largest prime. It's far larger than
any prime used in a practical system and doesn't contribute any mathematical
knowledge about primes.

It's mostly just running an algorithm for long enough to pay off.

------
MPSimmons
I believe the classic joke goes,

"Now Bruce Schneier needs to change the code on his luggage"

~~~
zeep
If you hack his computer, you can find the next largest known prime?

------
samstave
I know that humans want to know these things, but can someone ELI5 ___why_
__this important?

~~~
qmalzp
Consider it something like a benchmark of human progress.

------
madez
There is rarely a submission here on Hacker News that has comments of such bad
quality as this submission has.

I see a similar phenomenon with press. They "hype" something they barely
understand, change parts of the story to make it more interesting, or invent
new words (Cyber!). This is a disservice.

What do you do to avoid this noise?

