(Mostly) Confirmed: New Mersenne Prime Found

A reader writes "Distributed computing seems once more to be succesful. The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found there fifth result. Among them many belonging to /. readers. There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits, for which a considerable amount of money has been awarded. SETI looks for ET's messages, but found none sofar. Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us. A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space. " The Primenet list has confirmed that while they still need to totally test it out (which should be done by the 24th), they believe that the number found today is the 39th positive.

just think

just think if we dedicated all this computering power to a relevant problem...and before you ask, i'm a grad student in math, so don't call me out of touch with mathematics. i just think there are plenty of better problems (including w/in mathematics) than this, of course, why does my opinion matter?

Re:just think

Some of us do use our otherwise wasted idle-cycles for something useful:

Cancer drug research [ud.com]
Gene research [stanford.edu]
Protein folding [stanford.edu]

All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET [berkeley.edu] or cracking RC-5 [distributed.net].

Distributed computing.

I believe distributed computing has a lot of potential. Even though we are still in the early stages of it look at what has come out of it. It just amazes me that I can help find new prime numbers or search for ET from the comfort of my home. ( And without frying my brain thinking about it )

it's not being payed out...

until the 10 million digit mersenne prime is found, if one exists.

very interesting... but hey, this should pump a few more clients into SETI@home, rc5, and the rest of the bunch.

So what if ET...

...hasn't found this number is prime yet? Won't he/she just think this 3,500,000 digit number is a bunch of gibberish?

- Freed

my theory

My theory is that they're gone. I mean, really think about it:

20,000 years ago we were going around grunting at each other and living nomadic lives

10,000 years ago we finally began to make small villages, and practice agriculture

500 years ago we finally got the technology to send ships from Europe to North America

200 years ago people still read by candle light, died of infections from wounds, had no telephones or radio

100 years ago people still got around by horse and buggy

60 years ago people did the most complex math problems by hand

30 years ago NASA sent people to the moon with the computing power probably about what is found in a TI-89 calculator

20 years ago no one had ever heard of the internet, and computers were slow and text-based

10 years ago computers started to be a household necessity

5 years ago the internet took off

1 year ago the human genome was mapped

The point is: find someone from 50,000 BC ago and take them forward in time to 15,000BC. they probably wouldn't see a damn bit of difference

you could keep doing that for people of different ages, and the amount of time you could bring them forward without them really not being able to adjust to the massive changes in society would just get smaller and smaller. the time is getting so short now that a person can span it in a lifetime. we have middle-aged people today who are afraid to use computers.

Now try to imagine 100 years into the future. Pretty tough. Might we have real AI? Humans on the Moon and Mars? Computing implanations? Nanotech? Quantum computers? Yep. Pretty shocking. But now try to imagine 10,000 years into the future. It's impossible. IMO there is a very good chance that there will be no such thing as humans, as we know them, 10,000 years from now. We will have advanced into something better than these meat and bone bodies.

And the 20,000 years(max) from when humans first set down roots, and when they will no longer exist as humans, is nothing in galactic terms. It isn't even an eye-blink.

I think any civilization more than about 500 years more advanced than us might actually be *undetectable*. Maybe they exist as pure energy. Maybe they have transcended this universe altogether. Maybe they are studying us right now, but we don't know it because they are doing it from the 4th dimension(like a 3D being looking down on flatland).

I simply think anything beyond the near-future is impossible to even speculate on. The singularity. The end of history. Whatever you want to call it. It will be the end of the human race as we know it.

Perspective. . .

That we devote this much co-operation, time and energy to the quest for prime numbers while hatred, poverty, disease and environmental destruction continue to plague our race is hardly an advertisement for our planet's advancement.

Re:Perspective. . .

That we devote this much co-operation, time and energy to the quest for prime numbers while hatred, poverty, disease and environmental destruction continue to plague our race is hardly an advertisement for our planet's advancement.

Yes, and we're all awaiting your proposal for how to use a bunch of idle PCs and bandwidth to wipe out hatred, poverty, disease, and environmental destruction.

Until you get back to us with that, stop complaining about how we entertain ourselves, okay?

Re:Perspective. . .

That in spite of all the bad things happening, people can give all those who would tear them down the middle finger, and continue on in purely academic research?

I think PART of humanity has advanced, but those who:

a) cause misery
b) profit off misery
c) whine about misery

haven't really gotten anywhere.

Impressive, but....

3,500,000 digits is only 1/3 the length required for the major ($100,000) payoff. We still have a long way to go for that one....

This is great news - 2 reasons

First: distributed computing achieving something great. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for SETI, I've got it running on both my machines ... but being able to advance science be it math or cancer research or whatever is astonishingly cool.

Second: it's entertaining to think we can prove our intelligence to another species by sending them proof that we've cracked a prime ... If they're astonishingly more advanced than us they'll look at it as being quaint and if they're not they'll look at it as something they can't understand. How would we react if something landed that proclaimed how smart the sender was?
Of course, if they're "looking" at the wrong frequency or in the wrong band they won't see it at all... so many assumptions... so little time.

Prime stamp

http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/mersenne.shtml [utm.edu]

After the 23rd Mersenne prime was found at the University of Illinois, the mathematics department was so proud that they had their postage meter changed to stamp "2^11213-1 is prime" on each envelope.

Does anyone have an envelope with this stamp on it?

What if...

ET has no concept of our numbers?

I always find the idea that ET is "like" us somehow. That Will Smith can get into and operate an alien spaceship.

Zog: Mumtar! The Earthlings have sent us I Love Lucy and now what appears to be a very large cable bill!

Mumtar: Destroy them!

Folding your Distributed Computing

I really wish that more folks would look over at Stanford's Folding@Home Project [stanford.edu] . I personally think it is the single most important and fascinating distributed computing project available. Just think, instead of searching for obscure numbers, or aliens, or trying to break the latest RSA key, you could be curing cancer with your spare CPU cycles!!!

Participate!

Please, join in the fun. Go to www.mersenne.org [mersenne.org] to join. You've got an approximately 1 in 100,000 chance of winning the next EFF prize for finding a 10,000,000 digit prime number. That's way better than playing the lottery folks!

Decss?

What do you get if you save the prime as something.zip and unzip it?

Something juicy?

One problem...

Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us.

I wonder if it'll encourage or dicourage them from making first contact with us if they think we're all a bunch of math geeks with too much time on our hands?

guess what

a friend of mine in dallas has a marsenne prime as a phone number and, even cooler, and a number away, also the result of a prime factor as yet another number... please don't crank call him!

Does this really prove we are smart?

A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space.

Yup, ET is going to get our message and probably laugh, "Ha ha, what morons, they've only found the 39th one! Lets defeat their pitiful technology, take their resources, and make them slaves! Muhahahahah!"

How's the quote go? It's better to keep your mouth shut and leave people wondering if you're a fool, than to open it and prove that you are.

i'll join ya'll on the fun...

... just as soon as i get my hands on a $415 thous [slashdot.org]

ET's comment...

Geez... it's just a bunch of "1"'s. No information there...

Pride

After the 23rd Mersenne prime was found at the University of Illinois, the mathematics department was so proud that they had their postage meter changed to stamp "2 ^11213-1 is prime" on each envelope. Meanwhile, the humble physicists continued tests on thier time-travel prototype by sending an beaker into the future, wrote it in thier logs, and went home and ate bologna sandwiches.

No half assed help, please

Please don't volunteer for PrimeNet unless you are willing to devote yourself to the project. Too many people are signing up only to realize they are too busy for the task at hand.

If you can't do the time, don't do the prime.

(snort, snicker, guffaw, I can die a happy man now)

It generally helps to have enough data...

What most people don't tell you about the SETI@home project is that there are far more people processing the data than there is data to process. Most of the packets you're downloading to scan have been scanned dozens of times already--there just isn't enough data to justify all that computing power.

Now, if we built more radio telescopes [setileague.org]...

That'll get us off on the right foot ...

Why do we assume that math is the best way to impress extra terrestrials? If it impressed _us_ it would be incorporated into a reality show or a saturday morning teen sitcom.

I think the ultimate endeavor of human achievement is Truckzilla. A truck that can eat other trucks and breathes fire. I can see the aliens talking to each other ... "Sir, the terrans are too primitive for us to contact ... all we can receive are long numbers and primitive drawings ... Wait! It seems they have finally developed a truck that breathes fire and can eat other trucks! It's the only true measure of a sophisticated civilization."

Hmm...what if they're not big on math?

Seriously -- not speaking from a naysayer standpoint or as somebody who thinks that SETI is a complete waste of time, although I am both of these -- what if ETs don't do math?

I know, it's hard to fathom. But imagine this: human appreciation of art and life is rarely build on logical thought. When I say that my favorite painter is John Kacere, it has nothing to do with the trigonometry of his brush strokes and everything to do with what I like, a much more concept ideal. Conversation is a way of attempting to apply logic to what is essentially an illogical process, to explain a biological reaction with words and phrases.

So what would I think if Chewbacca beamed a thirty meg prime number into my PowerBook? I sure as hell wouldn't pick up instantly on its nature. I'd probably try and run it through a gif converter or play it on Audion before I'd think to perform the three year process that would uncover it as a prime number. If we're trying to make contact with primes, it seems that we're restricting our target intelligence to creatures smarter than me. Which seems defeatist. Why not start smaller, with a fibinacci sequence or the differential calculus or a DivX file of "The Facts of Life" (divx having been developed in less than a year)? Don't we realize that they'll want to check our math even if they do figure out what the stream of gibberish we're sending is all about?

And finally, what are they going to think when it gets there? Ifome superintelligent race of beings gets a message of a fact they already knew from a race of eggheads in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milky way, they're not inviting us to the intergalactic luau -- they're taking that hot race of Beings of Pure Sex from Omicron Six!

Microsoft primes?

When I go to http://www.mersenne.org/, I get a large yellow screen saying "Distributed Com", and a few borders, and nothing else. Are they using DCOM for this?

Warning: Transformers joke

Well... that's just Prime.

teams

So how does one join the Slashdot team?

a whole lotta cpus

See those names in the number one slot in this list [mersenne.org]? Wonder how that happened? Simple. This college [cmsu.edu] has a lot of computers. Let me see... I'd say there's 20 in the lab I'm in now.. then there's 60-70 in the lab I work in... 10 in the mathlab and 10 in the lab in the union...

Ok, now, out of all those computers, a few of them are Macs, a few of them are Linux boxes, and a few of them are Win9x boxes. ALL the rest of them run WinNT4 or Win2K. And on all of them (except the Macs), there is some verson of prime95 running. That's a whole lotta P-90 years.

The Prime Number Shitting Bear

I wonder how long it would take for The Prime Number Shitting Bear [surfeu.fi] to reach this number... ;)

Primes are fine and stuff, but check this out

With these two projects you can help find cures for diseases like Alzheimers, Mad Cow even cancer!

http://members.ud.com/projects/cancer/
big project sponsored by university of oxford, NFCR and Intel

http://folding.stanford.edu/
Protein Folding@Home - basically the same, much smaller in scale though

I run the one from UD on my windows desktop, and I run the folding@home client on my linux box :)

How far off is #42?

When they discover that the 42nd Mersenne Prime is actually 6*9, will all life on Earth suddenly cease?

Ratguy

EFF Prize

The EFF webpage says that the big prize ($100,000) is to be awarded for a 10,000,000+ digit prime, so the $100,000 is probably still up for grabs (if you should feel so lucky).

Granted, "greater than 3,500,000" could mean 10,000,000+ digits, but I don't think so...

Communicating with aliens is not a good idea

Am I the only person on the planet who thinks that it's a bad idea to be sending so much coded E-M and junk hardware outsystem in order to make contact with aliens? Seriously, I think it's a bad idea. First contact could be disastrous not because of any communication failure, but because those we contact are blood-thirsty monsters. We're barely two hundred years into the Industrial Revolution, only 60 years into the space age, and we are all still stuck on this planet. I think we should be hiding from the ETs, not welcoming them with open arms, like a planetful of suckers.

Slashdot editors: Be responsible.

From the Slashdot story posted by Hemos, (Mostly) Confirmed: New Mersenne Prime Found

pc's [Should be PCs.]

there fifth result [their]

money has been awarded [How could this be past tense if the results have not been confirmed?]

sofar [so far, until now]

a message send into outer space. " [two mistakes]

to totally test it out [to test it completely]

It is one of the characteristics of a young child that he or she only cares about himself or herself. It is one of the characteristics of an adult that he or she is considerate of others.

It is time for the Slashdot editors like Hemos to grow up and become responsible adults. Every time they post a story with spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors, they make every reader do more work. The errors are especially difficult for the many Slashdot readers for whom English is not their native language.

Someone who knows English well should edit all stories before they are posted.


An explanation of how the U.S. got involved in violence: What should be the Response to Violence? [hevanet.com]

I guess they just use a protocol droid...

I've always wondered, when they transmit these numbers into space, what encoding/protocol do they use? I mean, it's not likely that an alien race is going to be using ZModem for interstellar communication.

And if they're just doing something like a series of beeps, that would take a LONG time for a 3.5mil digit number.

other projects

What are some other distributed computing projects worth joining and donating cycles to?

Just how are these numbers "verified"?

I guess a good percentage of the readers have studied Eratosthenes of Cyrene [utah.edu], or at least his so-called "Sieve" to calculate primes. I'm wondering if anyone can outline how these larger numbers are found and validated?

Big karma for some lucky geek, no doubt.

Celebration on mailing list

I get the "digest" form of the mailing list. Here's what I just received this afternoon:
My mirror of the digest [freeshell.org]

Distributed works, SETI doesn't

It's great to see that Distributed.net is getting some work done. SETI's been around for years and they haven't found squat, which is particularly alarming since the damned things were given prime-time showings on CBS last night as well as releasing a new CD [mjifc.com].

GIMPS milestones

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search keeps all the large milestones here:

http://mersenne.org/status.htm [mersenne.org]

They haven't added #39 yet, but they probably will by the end of the day!!!

Ignorance?

Call me paranoid, but should we be revealing how much/little we know to ET?

ET1: The earthings only recognize - get this - 38 Mersenne prime numbers!!!

ET2: Prepare the battle cruisers.

Seti is stupid and pointless, Why waste resources?

Why not cure cancer? aids? anything?!?!? but sending radio signals to aliens in space is just plain stupid and a waste of time.

First of all, if you are looking for "intelligent" life, meaning more intelligent than us, chances are they will find us first, we wont have to search for more advanced life.

And primitive life? well they wouldnt have the technology to respond to radio signals, so what Seti really is searching for is human like life, on exactly the same technologicial level as us, the chances of finding this is 1 in billions literally do the math here.

So what is seti? A waste of time, and its equal to shouting in the jungle hoping you'll make friends with some wild animals, when in reality, none of them understand you and only run away from you, or attack you.

Like I said, theres much more important things to worry about than soundwaves in space and finding some aliens which may or may not be friendly and which are mostly as stupid as us.

Whats the point? If anyone can give me one reason why to donate resuorces to seti instead of the cancer cure research or aids cure, I'll give you a prize!

38th or 39th?

I have been unable to find exactly what the "new" prime is, and was wondering if it fell between the current 37 and 38. If it did, it would be only the 38th, and the "old" 38 would be the "new" 39.

What's the number?

Does anybody know what the number actually is? And isn't it a bit odd that it hasn't shown up as news on either the GIMPS Home Page [mersenne.org] or the PrimeNet Home Page [mersenne.org] yet?

Re:Grammar Goldmine

Oh, come on, pointing out grammar and spelling errors is like shooting fish in a barrel... and it's a barrel packed with sardines. And you have a cannon.

It's obvious people like Hemos don't care about speaking proper English, or they are so hyped up on caffeine or kernel code or whatever and make an outrageous number of typos. Anyhow, pointing out the problems just seems to waste bandwidth. I suggest we all just sit back relax and float downstream and enjoy the stories and discussion.

It's not worth "loosing" your cool.

Re:Waste of resources

Yeah, so long as every ounce of human effort is not going into relieving human suffering, we're all wasting our time.

Whatever.

Re:Grammar Goldmine

No kidding. ET may be out there, listening to broadcasts of Mersenne primes, but they probably don't respond because "them earthlings don't talk no good".

Re:Waste of resources

Dude, I totally understand human suffering and how it can be relieved by the awesome power of the CPU.

But.. 3.5 million digits.. that's just too cool! C'mon, admit it. ;)

Re:Waste of resources

Think of the children!!!

ugh

Re:Waste of resources

While a prime number with 3,500,000 digits might have a nice cool factor, it is completely useless for any practical purposes.

[smartass]Actually, the stipulation is that the number has no factors except for 1 and itself. I guess you could consider the number 1 as nice cool.[/smartass]

Agreed - was Re:Waste of resources

There are other projects that need these CPU cycles... projects like SETI are a waste.

If aliens are flying around in saucers from galaxies LIGHT YEARS away - then they will laugh at our "primitive" technologies. If they want to contact us - they WILL. And they probably already know about us already.

And if they don't, but have superior technologies - it's like sending them a message "Hi - we have inferior technology - come colonize our planet".

I'd rather give all my cpu cycles to Distributed.net's RC5-64 project.

Re:Waste of resources

While a prime number with 3,500,000 digits might have a nice cool factor...

Actually, the cool thing about primes is their *lack* of factors.

Re:Waste of resources

Uh huh. How many CPU cycles does it take to synthesize a pizza, eh?

If you want to make a distributed project to use spare CPU cycles to design new pharmaceuticals, engineer new food crops, or anything else that's "useful", go ahead. Otherwise piss off.

By the way, it may not be obvious to you, but the only problems that can be attacked using distributed computing are those that we can figure out how to split up into large numbers of mostly-independent, completely algorithmic subproblems.

Re:Grammar Goldmine

Among them many belonging to /. readers (This is not a complete sentence; there is no verb!).

"belong" is a verb. I bet the intransitive thing through you for a loop, though.

"He belongs in prison."
"That car belongs to me."
"That book belongs to the library."

Re:Waste of resources

Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.

And maybe you should donate the time and resources you use everyday reading slashdot to volunteer at the Red Cross or better yet - Join the Peace Corps! Also, I would argue that most of the problems with hunger and disease facing the planet are more social issues that technological. Anyway, thats not the point. Projects like this are an excellent way to work with distributed computing on a large scale and improve our knowledge of how it works and how it can be applied. Not everything has to be a great crusade to change the world.

Smallest?

Why do you consider negative numbers to be smaller than positive numbers? Most people usually equate the relative size of a number to its absolute value. So the smallest prime is two, and has been known for a long time.

Re:Quick question....

Primes are independent of base systems. Thirteen is prime whether you write it as "13", "D" or "1101." A small amount of arithmetic could verify this.

Re:Interesting...

Mersenne primes point directly to perfect numbers, which have on occassion been used in computer algorithms.

Re:Waste of resources

How about we focus on NOT telling people what they should be focusing their private resources on, and NOT telling people how disgusting they are to you?

Did you ever think it would be more productive to your cause to contribute YOUR time to it, rather than contributing your time to telling other people that they should spend THEIR time on it?

Did it occur to you that there are some people who don't want any part of your agenda, that maybe they have different priorities?

What disgusts me is people like you who try and push an agenda, but your way of getting people on board is to criticize what other people are doing, rather than make your effort look better with positive statements and actions.

You might find people more willing to help with your issues if you didn't criticize their own (scientifically) valid projects.

Just think about how much energy you "pissed away" with your negative statement. Nice, counterproductive work, that.

And, for the record, a prime number generally doesn't have "a nice cool factor" apart from itself, and it's unit. (1, in this case.)

Re:Waste of resources

hahahahahahahahahah

god that was good, i totally missed it too.

Re:Waste of resources

Um, Bill Gates took graduate level math courses at Harvard. Of course, he probably also knows the difference between a "coolness factor" and a numerical factor...

Re:so what is it?

The number itself, being millions of digits long, is obviously too large to show here, but it can easily be expressed in the form (2^p)-1, where p is some prime number, probably in the tens of millions.

Re:The $100k prize

Not only do you ignore correct diction regarding "they're", you also overlook mankind's duty to push the limits of mathematics. The discovery of this number adds data to an extremely small list. Who knows what amazing theories will be made as more data is collected from similar research projects?

Re:Grammar Goldmine

> The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet
> in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found
> there fifth result. Among them many belonging to
> /. readers.

It's not that bad, "there" aside. Either change "result. Among" to "result, among", or add "are" between "them" and "many". Ok, if you're fussy, PC should be capitalized, and an apostrophe is ok when pluralizing an acronym.

Re:Somewhere, in deep space...

"Oh, lookie! More apes offering up their cave paintings to the gods. More infants saying, 'Lookee mommy at my fingerpainting!' More children fishing for compliments about their creativity in wrapping a twist tie around their finger."