10 ms·
Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?
- TheRealPomax 2y agoThis title really needs "Mersenne" in it, because for just "primes" the answer is trivially "no".
- Dylan16807 2y agoThey're not talking about the next time we find a prime, but they're also not talking about the next time we find a Mersenne prime. They're talking about the next time we find a largest known prime. Mersenne or not. So while the title could be clearer, adding the word "Mersenne" would imply the wrong thing. While it's true that the next record will probably be Mersenne, the next Mersenne might not be a record.
- TheRealPomax 2y agoOr we can just, you know, read the page. Step 1: Claim your chunk of the fresh new Mersenne Prime which sure seems to suggest we're talking specifically about Mersenne primes. And then we keep reading, and it ends with: None of us can do it alone, but together we can achieve pointless, nerdy things. That is, unless... the folks at Mersenne.org find a new, even bigger Mersenne prime before we can do this. Which sure reinforces that this is about the Mersenne prime hunt, not just "any prime sequence". But why stop there? We could just watch the actual video.
- Dylan16807 2y ago> which sure seems to suggest we're talking specifically about Mersenne primes Primes with an s? No, that sentence is about the single prime that was just found, which happens to be Mersenne. > That is, unless... the folks at Mersenne.org find a new, even bigger Mersenne prime before we can do this. Because that's by far the most likely source for the next time we find a biggest prime. If we found one another way, I don't think they'd treat it any differently. And importantly they said "even bigger". We very likely have a lot of not-bigger Mersenne primes to find. But that wouldn't interrupt the project. > Which sure reinforces that this is about the Mersenne prime hunt, not just "any prime sequence". But why stop there? We could just watch the actual video. "Could humans say the largest prime number known to us before we find the next one?" sounds like exactly what I'm saying, not what you're saying.
- mserdarsanli 2y agoThey should say it in binary
- sigio 2y agoIt's a lot harder to make a mistake in binary mersenne primes, and if you loop your video's, 1 person should be able to do it quickly, so might be a bit boring.
- yen223 2y agoWell at least the calculations are easier It takes about 3s to say 10 "one"s There are 136,279,841 ones in the binary mersenne prime That works out to about 41 million seconds worth of footage, or about 473 days Given there was a gap of 6 years between the discovery of this mersenne prime and the previous, in theory 1 person could say all the digits (in binary) before we find the next mersenne prime!
- dylan604 2y agoSure, if that one person can stay awake and not eat/drink and use the restroom, sure. Otherwise, you need to make this union happy with 8 hour shifts, 2 15 minute breaks, and a minimum of 12 hour turn around before next shift. If they work more than 8 hours in a day, they are entitled to over time. Working a sixth day in a row is automatic 1.5x pay, and seven consecutive days is automatic 2x pay. Want to run your calculations again? =)
- joshdavham 2y agoThis looks like an awesome project! I wish you guys the best in your race against the machine.
- sushid 2y agoSome unanswered questions: why in 419 digit chunks? Are there repeating chunks that they're going to dedupe?
- kylecazar 2y agoAre they going to verify that everyone said their sequence correctly? It would be a silly and pointless prank to derail the effort by omitting a number on purpose, but this is the internet... Or maybe it's just the 'coming together' aspect that we're going for anyway, in which case, it doesn't matter :)
- aaron695 2y ago> Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence correctly? It's trivial-ish to do. First iteration - Google already auto-transcribes, just download the subtitles and compare to the required numbers. Someone else keen can check if that works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDAGe7lsII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDAGe7lsII
- LorenDB 2y agoMaybe they could run it through Whisper on Groq? It should be able to process individual clips in about a second.
- kylecazar 2y agoThat's what I was thinking... Compare the assigned chunk text with the output from an LLM transcription.
- dudus 2y agoSure and we could also run these LLMs on Arduino s because why not?
- eurleif 2y agoExcept that: >We're aware it's likely that if you're reading out a long string of digits like this, you're likely to slip up or say a wrong digit. Mistakes are a very human feature, but as long as you correct it and carry on, they're fine - we just need evidence of humans having said the whole prime, not necessarily in one go. You can watch your video back through before submitting to check it's ok. If you want to edit together multiple clips to make your video, that's also fine! So they need the some degree of semantic understanding to recognize corrections, in the various forms they can take. Speech to text alone is insufficient.
- bromuro 2y agoWhat about having a computer say them? How long would it take to have them recorded? The assignment here would be to find enough people to _listen_ to batches of 416 of them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qwe----3 2y agoJust to me, this seems like a waste of resources
- Svoka 2y agoBtw, is it possible to say such number at all? In English, I mean. How would that work?
- ryankrage77 2y agoProbably not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers only lists up to a Millinillion, or 10^3003. You can compound them, but it kinda defeats the point. A googol is too small, and a googolplex is too large.
- Arcorann 2y agoIf you check the section "Extensions of the standard dictionary numbers" on the page you linked, there's a system for naming arbitrarily large numbers as -illions. The prime here is approx. 8.82 * 10^41024319, and 10^41024319 is the 13674772nd -illion (short scale), so it would begin eight tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliduoseptuagintaseptingentillion.
- jamiek88 2y agoI think google just got fined that by Russia.
- o11c 2y agoThe whole point of the extensible system is that you can, in fact, extend it as much as you need. ... I just threw this into my zillion-ifier program and ... huh, it took 12 hours even with the GMP version, though I'll admit I didn't really optimize it ... the output is about a gigabyte of text eight tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliduoseptuagintaseptingentillion, eight hundred sixteen tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliunseptuagintaseptingentillion, nine hundred forty three tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliseptuagintaseptingentillion, two hundred seventy five tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentillinovensexagintaseptingentillion, thirty eight tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentillioctosexagintaseptingentillion, ...
- Waterluvian 2y agoFeels like a good cause to get out the IIGS and boot up Kid Talk.
- ks2048 2y agoThe homepage seems to be missing: 41 million digits at 2 digits per second ~= 237 days. It seems the 419 digits/person was chosen to lead to 100,000 people.
- Xcelerate 2y agoOoh, let’s do this with the Busy Beaver function too. BB(5) is only 12,289 binary digits to say out loud. BB(6) and BB(7) can’t possibly take that much longer to say.
- leononame 2y agoFor context, because I had to look it up: For BB(6), Σ(6) is known to be least 10 ↑↑ 15 for in Knuth's up-arrow notation. You can read this as 10^(10 ↑↑ 14) = 10^(10^(10 ↑↑ 13)) and so on. It's much more than just a lot. Anyone know how many digits this is?
- aphantastic 2y agoBB(5) is known to be 47,176,870, or 10110011111101110010100110 in base 2. https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/BB(5) https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/BB(5)
- Xcelerate 2y agoYeah, that’s the shift function / number of steps. I’m talking about the length of the contents on the tape when the machine enters a halt state. The notation “BB” is a bit overloaded in the literature.
- aphantastic 2y agoThe length of the contents of the tape of any halting TM will be less than or equal to the number of steps it takes to run. Quite trivially: you can’t consume tape without taking a step. For BB(5), 4098 1’s are written to the tape (this is referred to as Σ(5)). As for the length of the contents, I’m not sure, but again you can’t so sume tape without a step, and anecdotally the BBs are generally “back and forth”, at least the Collatz-like ones (which BB(5) is).
- justplay 2y agodoes the current largest prime number have any practical implications as for today ?
- TZubiri 2y agoMost cryptography is based on factoring difficulty
- schoen 2y agoNot using primes anywhere near the range of the largest-known ones. The primes in your RSA keys are likely to be 1024-bit primes, or about 308 digits.
- hansvm 2y agoPlus, the (known) large ones are all of a nice enough pattern that you could almost factor just by looking at the digit count of the product.
- schoen 2y agoOr by finding them in one of the lists of largest known primes. :-)
- hansvm 2y agoYes, sorry, the implicit assumption I accidentally left in my head is that when we're talking about factoring being important, it's products of 2 biggish primes (hence an answer one step removed from the lists of largest known primes).
- graboy 2y agoNo.
- sklivvz1971 2y agoYes: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/443706/why-it-is-important-to-find-largest-prime-numbers https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/443706/why-it-is-im...
- largbae 2y agoThe key is to say it in a base-M136279841 number system.
- alwayslikethis 2y ago1
- arjvik 2y ago10, actually
- peeters 2y agoAnd how do you pronounce that?
- wslin 2y agoEvery base is base 10 ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/every_base_is_base_10/?rdt=56620 https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/eve...
- gcanyon 2y agoI love this! I can't believe I've been a math person basically forever and this is the first time I've heard this.
- meowster 2y agoold.* URL and without the ?rdt tracking, whatever that is: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/every_base_is_base_10/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/eve...
- utopcell 2y agoSo, each human gets 419 digits from a pool of ~41M digits, or a target of ~100k videos uploaded. This is the weirdest DDoS attack on YouTube I've seen.
- CrazyStat 2y agoYoutube has more than that uploaded every single day.
- dyauspitr 2y agoYouTube has on average close to 4 million video uploads per day
- wruza 2y agoAnd still can’t recommend me anything interesting outside of my chamber.
- zimpenfish 2y agoI wouldn't mind if it didn't keep recommending me videos I've already watched (they're showing the red bar! they know I've watched it!) or from channels I've already said no to or on topics I've frequently said no to or on topics that I watched one video on[1] and now YouTube thinks I want a full page of similar videos. The algorithm is, for want of some better words, absolute cack. [1] Even if I don't finish the video or say I don't like it or say "don't recommend channel", FFHS
- wruza 2y agoLol, I know the pain (who doesn’t). Disliking and removing from history works for me, at least in the short term. I put history right on the sidebar with unhook extension, I believe. Sometimes I clear whole pages from there to avoid spam. What to do with videos I don’t want to dislike, idk. It keeps recommending watch-once-already-watched videos indefinitely.
- cfiggers 2y agoBig assumption there
- unsigner 2y agoNice try, AI trainers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- noduerme 2y ago[flagged]
- sklivvz1971 2y ago[flagged]
- poincaredisk 2y agoTo be fair, both have no direct practical applications. And getting people interested in math is actually a great side-effect of stunts like this.
- sklivvz1971 2y agoThe direct application of looking for primes is that's an interesting computer science research project (perf, networking, big data) with a clear practical use, besides obviously being a pure research field which is valuable in itself. There are 800+ results in google scholar for the project (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=GIMPS&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_rr=1 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=GIMPS&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&...) Vocalizing primes? Maybe it could be used in speech synthesis although I'm not sure that the terms allow it or that the participants would be happy with their voice becoming AI...
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoWriting an emulator for the Z80 also has no practical uses but we all do things for fun don't we?
- sklivvz1971 2y agoI am glad you like it. I never claimed my personal projects are anything more than that. They have uses for me for sure :-) But then, you know, I don't involve 100k people in my projects...
- gray_-_wolf 2y ago> with a clear practical use, What is a practical use for largest known prime number?
- lordelph 2y agoI got strong "The Nine Billion Names of God" vibes from this! Just as the last video is uploaded, without any fuss, the stars start going out... https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
- fleabitdev 2y agoI last read that story nearly a decade ago, I think. This time around, it feels more real. The engineers follow silly instructions from people with money, and then...
- Forgeties79 2y agoThat was a fun read. I think I let myself get a little too excited for an ending that couldn’t possibly satisfy, but it was still satisfying innit its own way
- Forgeties79 2y ago“Innit its” lol sorry for the weird typo
- robertlagrant 2y agoI read this as a teenager. So good.
- rtkwe 2y agoA similar kind of story though much longer is Unsong by Scott Alexander. The prolog starts with Apollo 8 crashing into the celestial sphere and divine magic starts leaking back into the world; Angels are real, Kabala based on the names of God allow real magic and they've been copyrighted. Our protagonist is a worker bee that spends all day saying nonsense combinations that could be True Names for his employer to patent and sell. One day right after the end of his shift he stumbles on one completely by accident and it changes everything. https://unsongbook.com/ https://unsongbook.com/
- fuglede_ 2y agoAt https://youtube.com/watch?v=5GFW-eEWXlc&t=1480s https://youtube.com/watch?v=5GFW-eEWXlc&t=1480s, the characters in the 1977 epic space opera Star Wars state the first 48 (binary) digits of the prime, 47 years before its discovery!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thih9 2y ago> None of us can do it alone Off topic but this is not technically true. 41 million digits means 1.3 years of saying one digit per second. Even taking 3x as long, to account for sleep and other activities, this would take about four years - still very much doable. Four years times $100k/year plus $100k completion bonus equals $500k; I guess many people would be willing to do it alone under these conditions.
- whaaaaat 2y agoDo we find prime numbers slower than one every four years? I would have thought we find newer bigger ones more quickly than that. The goal of this project is not only to say the big number, but to say the big number before we discover the next bigger number.
- NineStarPoint 2y agoIt took 6 years between the last largest prime number and the most recent. The two gaps before that were each only 1 year though. So depends on how lucky you think you’ll get.
- tyjkot 2y agoForgive my ignorance, but what is the purpose of finding prime numbers that are insanely large?
- envp 2y agoBeyond a points its curiosity and pushing existing computational techniques to their limits. Sometimes it leads to new discoveries in computational techniques or in rarer cases new theoretical work. Long story short, it’s fun to find out new things about weird numbers :)
- tyjkot 2y agoThank you for educating me on this.
- jebarker 2y agoBecause they're there
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 256_ 2y agoThis question is addressed here: https://www.mersenne.org/why_join/ https://www.mersenne.org/why_join/
- jws 2y agoDon't be boring. A quick triage with an AI and a spot check suggest that the guitar solo at the end of Hotel California has just about the right number of notes (depending on how many '7' you get). Sweet Child of Mine probably works. Comfortably Numb(ber) allegedly works, but I doubt any of the singers I have access to can enunciate fast enough. For the most relaxed of the options, it has amazing little clouds of fast notes. MUST RESIST: this is worse than waking up to a Saturday morning "Nerd Sniping", I could lose the whole weekend to this… I'll bet Nate isn't busy… With him and the girls from (redacted) Bohemian Rhapsody could work… UPDATE: There goes the weekend. So far I've been in a fight with ChatGPT about counting syllables in copyrighted lyrics where I ended up suggesting it get help for its obvious emotional trauma at the hands of an IP lawyer and lined up 5 singers. "enjoy the ride" has beaten "they are just intrusive thoughts".
- lupire 2y agoRelated prior art: "She's My Number Pi: The Irrationally Long Number Pi Song" https://youtu.be/Skf8NTEnrO4?si=gWDlZwNi67Zc7nLM https://youtu.be/Skf8NTEnrO4?si=gWDlZwNi67Zc7nLM
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago"Constrained writing" is literally the thing these LLM's are good at. The Great Gatsby is pitiful in comparison to the output any prompt anyone reading this can obtain within seconds. Not to diminish, it is fun as fuck, but accumulating uncannily daily.
- metalman 2y agogiven some sort of excrmption from time the chance of any human or group of humans getting it right are still zero, nobody is that good, so the only plausable way to do it, is to just aproximate the number, which we then might as well get on with congradulating ourselves with a job well done, me first I so great,now you ,and you ,and well everybody so great now
- carabiner 2y agoI can, but I'm built different.
- creativenolo 2y agoThis is wonderful. But then I read it, and they call it stupid. And then I think, oh… I think I will move on. How boring am I. And why put it up on YouTube - so many videos - given you can’t legitimately download all the videos (unless I am mistaken?) I mean you are investing so much of other people time with this, you think you might offer up an alternative own system in return… how boring I am.
- magicmicah85 2y agoHow fun. I went ahead and automated this by recording numbers 0-9 into mp3 files and then reading each prime number individually to play the mp3 of the corresponding number. Feel free to reuse if you want to participate. https://gist.github.com/magicmicah/a8cf863ed656e5b56c54496561a1767b https://gist.github.com/magicmicah/a8cf863ed656e5b56c5449656...
- MarcellusDrum 2y agoI understand the nerdy need to automate this, but I feel like this defeats the purpose of the while experiment.
- yuvadam 2y agoI don't know, it seems like a nice creative take, and it is their voice (as opposed to text-to-speech) so it does fit the requirements
- magicmicah85 2y agoAnd that’s fair, it’s certainly more monotone and less human but knowing me, I would make ten mistakes before I finally got to a good cut.
- cryptica 2y agoWhen I see stuff like this, I don't understand how the economics work out for YouTube. So many pointless videos uploaded for free. How can they possibly make a profit?
- Jackosas 2y ago[dead]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoInstead of base 10, you use base largest known prime, then this is pretty easy to do: 1