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sharedholder
12-03-2003, 07:50 AM
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

SOURCE (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12985)

READ MORE (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm)

FuNkY CaPrIcOrN
12-03-2003, 08:25 AM
:blink: Say what dude? :blink:

james_bond_rulez
12-03-2003, 08:41 AM
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:

DasScoot
12-04-2003, 01:57 AM
1. wtf is a Mersenne Prime?

2. 2 to the power of 20 million is a lot more than 220 million.

vivitron 15
12-04-2003, 12:11 PM
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.