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40th Mersenne Prime confirmation proves power of P2P
You count them in, you count them out again
By INQUIRER staff: martedě 02 dicembre 2003, 21.48
EARLIER REPORTS that peer to peer software had discovered a 40th Mersenne Prime have been confirmed by the GIMPS pursuing the ultimate numbers.
The boffins have said the newly discovered Mersenne Prime is 220,996,011-1, or 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1.
Michael Shafer picked it up on the 17th November last, as a result of using prime 95 on his office computer.
And the discovery was verified by Guillermo Ballester Valor on November 30, using Glucas on a quad Itanium-II machine.
But that machine only used two of the four available processors. Glucas was three days faster than a Pentium 4 2.1GHz single CPU machine, the boffins report. [2.1GHz? Does Intel make that speed? Ed.]
Shafer is a chemical engineering student at Michigan State University. µ
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:blink: Say what dude? :blink:
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are they really that bored? <_<
how about finding ways to combat chemical wars?
damn students obcessed with prime numbers :lol:
what a waste of p2p resources :lol:
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1. wtf is a Mersenne Prime?
2. 2 to the power of 20 million is a lot more than 220 million.
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A mersenne prime is a number of the form (2^n)-1 which is prime (i.e. only divisible by 1 and itself)
basically, people are trying to find the biggest primes possible...kinda like the people who devote their lives to finding better estimates of pi.
and i suspect the site this was taken from used a different font, so 2^20 million became 2 20million.
