M43112609 (2008-08) was discovered prior to M42643801 (2009-06), so that order is not really strict. I agree that there is a human tendency to test smaller prim

M43112609 (2008-08) was discovered prior to M42643801 (2009-06), so that order is not really strict. I agree that there is a human tendency to test smaller primes (thus faster to verify) first, but it should be also noted that every single Mersenne number smaller than M124399361 has been already tested at least once by someone even though that limit would be way higher than what we have for primes. There are also some groups of people that specifically look for prime numbers that are barely enough to be 100,000,000+ decimal digits [1]. Given we didn't see any new Mersenne prime for many years, new prime from a random range seems much more likely than ever. [1] See https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/ and scroll down to the starting exponent of 332,000,000. There would be an unusually large number of assigned LL/PRP tasks around this range. In fact, this holds for virtually all available PrimeNet statuses in the Wayback machine!