Huge new prime number discovered

news.bbc.co.uk

5 pointsreazalun5 comments

forgive me if i sound naive, but i would have though it was a relatively simple task to design program to decipher which numbers were prime numbers ad infinitum. if it was april 1st, i would have thought this was a jest. is this really that praise-worthy and notable?

It's easy to identify small prime numbers. Prime numbers with 13 million digits are a bit harder -- for one thing, only one out of every 30 million numbers you look at will be prime.

From the article: "The team from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) found the new number by linking 75 computers and harnessing their unused power. This enabled them to perform the enormous number of calculations needed to find and verify a new prime. "

It's probably just a matter of processing power needed to find that number(s).

Actually the prime was found through GIMPS and that is a vast distributed computing project. See http://www.mersenne.org/

> It's probably just a matter of processing power needed to find that number(s).

It's just a matter of strength and technique to run a world record 100 meter....

It's not just processing power, although it was a large amount of processing power, it was knowing how to use it.

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