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New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)
- jmclnx 2y agoNice and tentative congratulations. I use to run Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), but now all I have is laptops. It runs to hot on the Laptops I have :( Will need to play with throttling some more. Edit: found mprime (mprime-bin-24.14) is available in NetBSD pkgsrc. But this uses 32 bit linux emulation to execute, I have been trying to avoid it, but may try it.
- ziofill 2y agoI can swear something like 20+ years ago I found a new one too, but I didn’t realize the importance of it. I had just downloaded GIMPS and I was just messing around with it, and when I saw the message I thought “ok, cool!” and proceeded to turn it off.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- lifthrasiir 2y agoDo you have any slightest idea about the exponent, including how many digits in the exponent? I assume you had no account (otherwise there should have been some logs for that).
- therein 2y agoI'd believe it. Many years ago when I was around 10 years old and not understanding the concept of probability properly, I decided I had come up with a way to enumerate the lottery numbers and come up with a reasonably sized set of numbers to place bets for. I proceeded to write 9 pages of numbers for my father to place bets for. It is a 6/49 lottery so 6 balls are drawn from a set of 49 and you need to get all of them right to get the jackpot. It would have cost a little under 95$ to have played all my numbers (for a jackpot around $1.5M) I gave him however it would have taken a lot of effort to manually enter them. My father just does one page because it is silly. The numbers are silly, everything about this is silly. I completely understand in hindsight. But it turned out page 7 had the winning combination.
- Jerrrry 2y agoI've seen that movie too
- Nition 2y agoI'm not sure why your comment is currently downvoted, you're not claiming it was anything but random luck and it's a funny story. Thanks for sharing.
- ashleyn 2y agoIf the balls were improperly weighted at the lottery commission, then maybe you'd have unwittingly discovered the bias in the game. That's certainly possible.
- schoen 2y agoIf it was literally around "20+ years ago", like 2004 or slightly before, it might have been M40 or M41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mersenne_primes_and_perfect_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mersenne_primes_and_pe... If this happened the way you remember, it's really unfortunate, but it wouldn't have stopped the prime in question from being discovered, because GIMPS always at least eventually gives out numbers to multiple people to check, and doesn't mark Mersenne numbers as checked until a computer actively reports that they were checked. However, your name could have ended up on that Wikipedia list as a discoverer. :-)
- aphantastic 2y agoInteresting that all the primes since 2001 have been discovered by Intel processors (at least those where the processor was recorded). How’s that for marketing?
- throawayonthe 2y ago[dead]
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoIf bitcoin used a facet of primality in its Proof-of-Work, that would nearly needlessly gloating. But it doesn't, and unfortunately even worse, it wasn't ASIC-resistant, which had second-order effects that Intel could had actually taken advantage of if they werent sleeping from being too comfortable.
- freeqaz 2y agoIs there a good POW mechanism that would test primes? I found this but curious what else exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThats it (afaik), and it could be for the usual, dismissive reasons, but its easy to hand-waive the "make primality a part of the work" part but it also comes down to the properties of the work that require it to be useful: the difficulty of the work must be adjustable, the difficulty/reward ratio must scale to the polynomial of users/work-rate to avoid sybil/"51% (31%)" attacks, and dissuade volatility during transitions must be easily verifiable, Primecoin uses Cunningham Chain primes - basically sequences of primes where 2x+1 is prime. They are marginally useful with other applications on the horizon. I could see adjusting the arbitrary rule-set - similar to the varying rulesets of cellular automata, like Conways - to further Number Theory/Game Theory/Swarm Economics at a general interdisciplinary level to be the most potentially rewarding, covering a larger swath of unknown unknowns.
- rollinDyno 2y agoHey at least you weren't one of those kids who ran into those online faucets that were giving bitcoins for free and didn't think too much about it.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoits like "the game" but you feel like you got stabbed by Hindsight herself
- stavros 2y agoI remember the faucet giving 5 BTC to play with. I still have my wallet history from those days, with transactions of multiple millions (today) in BTC between wallets and friends.
- Aurornis 2y ago> I had just downloaded GIMPS and I was just messing around with it, and when I saw the message I thought “ok, cool!” and proceeded to turn it off. GIMPS would run for weeks or months first. You wouldn’t have seen anything if you had just downloaded it and were messing around. As I recall, you had to do some work to get it running at boot automatically.
- stavros 2y agoDoes it take months to check one prime? Maybe the author got extremely lucky.
- solardev 2y agoI thought this was about GIMP at first, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Like did they hide a prime number check into the brush strokes algorithm so users would become pseudorandom generators whenever they made art...? And you just happened to draw the right thing that also happened to be a prime? But nope, it's just a similar acronym! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...
- nbbaier 2y agoI absolutely had the same thought progression
- beyondCritics 2y agoGreat news for humanity.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hyperhello 2y agoWe get free two-day shipping on our Mersennes.
- xanderlewis 2y agoThanks, Jeff!
- dooglius 2y agoWhy don't they say what it is?
- CamperBob2 2y agoOr even the number of digits.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoBecause the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards for the first discovery of large enough prime numbers are still active. Publishing the probable prime in advance would risk someone verifying faster than GIMPS.
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt's hard to see how that someone would count as the discoverer.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoThat someone will totally count as the discoverer under the current rules [1], because it requires the deterministic primality proof for given number. It doesn't matter how much effort was taken to reach that candidate so far, even though it would be virtually impossible to find any new prime without that. I think the temporary embargo is fully justified for this reason. (And I think it is technically possible to probe the reports to find what it was anyway, but it is not easy to find one at least for me. If you are really looking for that, look for the P-PRP result type.) [1] https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/rules https://www.eff.org/awards/coop/rules
- phkahler 2y agoIs there a probabilistic test for Mersene primes? I thought they just wanted confirmation via independent calculation.
- 2y ago
- MPSimmons 2y agoTime for Bruce Schneier to change the combination to his luggage again
- schoen 2y agoFor anyone who didn't get the joke, this is a reference to https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/365 https://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/365 from the "Bruce Schneier Facts" series (which was inspired by the "Chuck Norris Facts").
- m463 2y agolooking at the picture, I imagine it's like a zero day when you can "enter the drag-on' (it's like a prime protected carry-on that schneier carries)
- winwang 2y agothank you for the education :) this is so good!
- fhars 2y agoNot 137? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/picking_physici.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/picking_physi...
- Waterluvian 2y agoIt’s not quite 137, though. The last digit needs to be oh so slightly off.
- hinkley 2y agoLuggage that would make Dan Brown green with envy.
- throwawee 2y agoNeedlessly confusing if Dan Brown is green and Dan Green is white. Somebody standardize Dans.
- natas 2y agoChuck Norris has already discovered and factorized all the prime numbers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toast0 2y agoA number is prime if its factors are itself, one, and Chuck Norris.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoA number is prime if it is the number of times Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked Optimus Prime
- ramshanker 2y agoAwesome. I have been recommending in my organization, 24 Hrs. Prime95 Stress Test as part of acceptance protocol for all new servers ! Happy to see it find another record Mersenne Prime.
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agoy-cruncher is the king of stress testing
- dudeinjapan 2y agoHell yeah!! This is the best thing to happen all week!!!
- Eliezer 2y agolol, like the government doesn't have 3 more Mersennes they keep secret so they can verify potential First Contact situations
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agothe idea of a deep-nation-state-cold-war psyop campaign bluffing and escalating math proofs is so goddamn hilarious, apt, and ironic it would be almost better than the mistake of pissing off the Aliens by offending them with math homework. "Shizuo Kakutani joked that the problem [Collatz conjecture] was a Cold War invention of the Russians meant to slow the progress of mathematics in the West."
- jiggawatts 2y agoThey're much easier to verify than to find. Just ask for the next one hundred unknown primes and check the response.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoThis still suffers from the MitM / Two Generals Problem, and is existentially problematic if they also demand the simple, reasonable sum of the first BB(17) numbers modulo Grahams number, within 14 business local parsec-years. Their spam filter may be an annoying ping acknowledgement, a directed gamma ray beam from soft gamma repeater, just to irradiate their own hoax-doers suspects.
- dataflow 2y agoGiven this contest can presumably go on infinitely long, what is the ultimate point of the contest? Is there some kind of theoretical or practical benefit to discovering a new Mersenne prime?
- artursapek 2y agoIt’s exploration of new lands
- ISL 2y agoTo learn something about primes. Perhaps there is a pattern or a way to more-accurately predict which numbers will be prime. Also, it is cool.
- mort96 2y agoDo we expect to learn something interesting from any given new Mersenne prime discovered? Don't we kinda have enough so that if we are going to discover something interesting by analyzing them, we can do that with the ones we already know about?
- lagadu 2y agoI'm not an SME but I would imagine that if there's some sort of very large scale pattern in Mersenne primes then finding that might lead to the discovery of some currently unknown emergent property. Of course this argument is likely unfalsifiable, as it can scale infinitely if there's an infinite amount of them, though we don't even know whether they are a finite set or not.
- tomtomtom777 2y agoIsn't the fact that a certain number is a Mersenne prime interesting in itself? Surely it's a great addition to our knowledge of numbers?
- mort96 2y agoSure, I'm not against GIMPS or anything, I'm just a bit doubtful that finding a few more Mersenne primes could be the key to unlocking some secret pattern in the primes is all
- benreesman 2y agoI turned 40 recently and it was the only devastating milestone before or since. No excuses: I blew that.
- jl6 2y agoFinally! Just when I thought everyone had moved their spare compute to more lucrative schemes. It’s the longest wait for a new mersenne prime since the discovery of M32 in 1992.
- noduerme 2y agoamazing how many bitcoins have been discovered since then. Satoshi should've incentivized mining something useful.
- yreg 2y agoAre these high Mersenne primes all that useful?
- gnramires 2y agoI've been thinking there should actually be more useful (or at least more interesting? :P) crowd computing stuff. How about something like Superoptimizing (with correctness proofs) open source code?
- michaelcampbell 2y agoI think there's actually a fair number of them, but more would be nice. Lots of protein folding ones, and there used to be a weather/climate related couple.
- iamgopal 2y agoevery new prime for new block, but not linear.
- stevefan1999 2y agoBut why do we have to "discover" it when we know the formula would be 2^N - 1...? Are we trying to prove a corollary or what?
- aaronmdjones 2y agoNot all 2^N - 1 are prime. For example, N=18 makes 2^N - 1 = 262143, which can also be written as 3^3 * 7 * 19 * 73 (not prime).
- stevefan1999 2y agoOh, right, all Mersenne number is in the form of 2^N -1, but Mersenne prime is Mersenne number plus being prime
- mort96 2y agoAnd we look for Mersenne primes, AFAIU, mainly because Mersenne numbers are more likely to be prime than other numbers, so it's easier to find big primes that way.
- School-Cotton 2y agoA lot simpler example is 2^4-1=5*3
- lupire 2y ago2^11-1 (prime power) for a less trivial example
- Jabrov 2y agoThere’s tons of numbers of the form 2^N-1 which are not prime. To discover the primes, we have to iterate through the numbers and test their primality. With numbers that are so big, it’s very compute intensive
- hockyy 2y agohttps://oeis.org/A000043 https://oeis.org/A000043
- sfelicio 2y agoIf anyone is interested in knowing more, Veritasium has a good video on this, "The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math": https://youtu.be/Zrv1EDIqHkY https://youtu.be/Zrv1EDIqHkY
- sashank_1509 2y agoI always wondered if we could parallelize a prime test on GPU. That would give us a Datacenter level compute and really help us scale, but it might be too hard to do.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agohttps://github.com/preda/gpuowl https://github.com/preda/gpuowl
- p5a0u9l 2y agoAre there statistics on the scale of compute available to GIMPS for this search? Is there any evidence that by crowdsourcing the clients, we are searching faster than, eg, a dedicated cluster financed by a government or a corporation? What is the impact of GIMPS as a distributed problem solving tool? Like, if there was a practical application, how much money would it take to exceed GIMPS throughput, that curious people provide for free? I’d like it to be astronomical, but given the niche of this, and the low cost of cloud compute, the answer is predicable depressing, like, “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput”
- mpreda 2y ago> “$50k/year in AWS costs would equal current GIMPS search throughput” I think you may be wrong by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
- areyousure 2y agohttps://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ suggests 127 PFlop/s average over the last month, which would put it in the top 10 on https://top500.org/lists/top500/2024/06/ https://top500.org/lists/top500/2024/06/ I used a random estimate online for computing cost which had 5.6e17 Flops per dollar on A100s gives about a dollar every 4.4 seconds or ~$7 million per year. Sadly, I do not vouch for the correctness of any part of this, though I did try.
- potench 2y agoFor others that, like me, do not know… a Mersenne prime is when the n is prime and the resulting M is also prime in the following equation. M = 2ⁿ - 1
- loup-vaillant 2y agoI didn’t know, but according to Wikipedia we don’t need to require `n` to be prime, because when it isn’t, then neither is 2ⁿ-1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime So I prefer to shorten the definition to "A prime of the form 2ⁿ-1". It’s bloody useful that n has to be prime though: makes searching that much faster.
- fnord77 2y agoStill no Prime95 release build for Apple silicon
- gcanyon 2y agoAnyone have a sense of how much money/electrical power is being spent to discover these primes? I'm not about to argue for bitcoin calculations over this, I'm just curious how it compares.