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Your edit:
…although seemingly useless… 219.88.219.37 ( talk) 18:49, 30 May 2004
Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper are now both on AfD, people here may want to comment. -- Salix alba ( talk) 17:26, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
The "M" notation in this article differs from that in most other articles on Mersenne primes. Here, the largest currently known prime (as of mid-2007), 232582657-1, is referred to as M32582657. However, most of what I have read about this number also identifies it as M44, the 44th currently known Mersenne prime.
If the definition at the beginning of the article Mersenne prime is followed, then the above number ought to be identified as either M32582657 or M(32582657) instead so as to avoid confusion with how Mersenne primes are identified; this should also apply to the other nine GIMPS-discovered primes so listed. Glenn L 07:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
It would be helpful to justify why one of the largest computer clusters in the world is used for something as seemingly useless as finding Mersenne prime numbers. Folding@home, SETI@home and projects similar to those work towards discovering very useful information, whereas GIMPS
is to serve these seven purposes, as pasted from
http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html:
1- Tradition - is tradition a good enough reason to waste the processing time of a virtual supercomputer?
2- For the by-products of the quest - understandable, yet those by-products that primes.utm.edu name dont seem worthy of a suprcomputer to me
3- People collect rare and beautiful items - see comment to 1
4- For the glory! - see comment to 1
5- To test the hardware - acceptable
6- To learn more about their distribution - what for?
7- For the money - yeah
I'm not attacking GIMPS, its just that the reasons presented don't convince me that there is no other more important use to which this processing cluster could be put to.
DrSlony (
talk) 00:31, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
"The number M43112609 has 12,978,189 digits. To help visualize the size of this number, a standard word processor layout (50 lines per page, 75 digits per line) would require 3,461 pages to display it." Maybe it would be more helpful to state how many meters of Bibles or Harry Potter 7 books in a pile would be required for the number to be print in... 512upload ( talk) 23:10, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
See here,
Tentative discovery of the 47th known Mersenne prime was reported by G. Woltman in e-mail messages sent June 4 and 7, 2009. The prime was apparently discovered in April, but was not noticed due to a configuration problem with the server that prevented a notification email being sent to the search organizers. Verification and official announcement of the value are expected shortly. Unoffocially, the number appears to be , which has decimal digits, making it the 46th smallest known Mersenne prime and the second (not the first) largest.
Keep our ears open. Baccyak4H ( Yak!) 19:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
I was interested to find that the Mersenne primes were not found "in order". I guess I naively thought that GIMPS would start low, and work its way up to larger and larger numbers. Since that doesn't seem to be the case, perhaps some discussion of the search strategy would be warranted. How does GIMPS pick which numbers to test next, and how does it ensure it doesn't retest numbers which have already been ruled out? -- 128.104.112.114 ( talk) 13:32, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Have you read Isaac Asimov's articles about Prime Numbers and Skewes Numbers? WFPM ( talk) 23:03, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
" … eleven of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery." Shouldn’t that be 12 since Jan. 2013? Perhaps this statement is altogether of little interest, PR, and might be omitted? – Fritz Jörn ( talk) 05:26, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
IDK WikiEdit SOP, so I made a code comment. This paragraph isn't finished - it merely defines the awards associated with primes without defining how GIMPS taxes the winner, which is the whole reason I came to this article. Again, I have never been moved to do this so my apologies for peeing in your corner of the sandbox. PeasKraut Zef2Def Comment made in article [7] by 2601:98A:700:1F80:D416:CF76:213C:9E72 and moved to talk by Meters 07:35, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 05:06, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
Your edit:
…although seemingly useless… 219.88.219.37 ( talk) 18:49, 30 May 2004
Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper are now both on AfD, people here may want to comment. -- Salix alba ( talk) 17:26, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
The "M" notation in this article differs from that in most other articles on Mersenne primes. Here, the largest currently known prime (as of mid-2007), 232582657-1, is referred to as M32582657. However, most of what I have read about this number also identifies it as M44, the 44th currently known Mersenne prime.
If the definition at the beginning of the article Mersenne prime is followed, then the above number ought to be identified as either M32582657 or M(32582657) instead so as to avoid confusion with how Mersenne primes are identified; this should also apply to the other nine GIMPS-discovered primes so listed. Glenn L 07:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
It would be helpful to justify why one of the largest computer clusters in the world is used for something as seemingly useless as finding Mersenne prime numbers. Folding@home, SETI@home and projects similar to those work towards discovering very useful information, whereas GIMPS
is to serve these seven purposes, as pasted from
http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html:
1- Tradition - is tradition a good enough reason to waste the processing time of a virtual supercomputer?
2- For the by-products of the quest - understandable, yet those by-products that primes.utm.edu name dont seem worthy of a suprcomputer to me
3- People collect rare and beautiful items - see comment to 1
4- For the glory! - see comment to 1
5- To test the hardware - acceptable
6- To learn more about their distribution - what for?
7- For the money - yeah
I'm not attacking GIMPS, its just that the reasons presented don't convince me that there is no other more important use to which this processing cluster could be put to.
DrSlony (
talk) 00:31, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
"The number M43112609 has 12,978,189 digits. To help visualize the size of this number, a standard word processor layout (50 lines per page, 75 digits per line) would require 3,461 pages to display it." Maybe it would be more helpful to state how many meters of Bibles or Harry Potter 7 books in a pile would be required for the number to be print in... 512upload ( talk) 23:10, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
See here,
Tentative discovery of the 47th known Mersenne prime was reported by G. Woltman in e-mail messages sent June 4 and 7, 2009. The prime was apparently discovered in April, but was not noticed due to a configuration problem with the server that prevented a notification email being sent to the search organizers. Verification and official announcement of the value are expected shortly. Unoffocially, the number appears to be , which has decimal digits, making it the 46th smallest known Mersenne prime and the second (not the first) largest.
Keep our ears open. Baccyak4H ( Yak!) 19:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
I was interested to find that the Mersenne primes were not found "in order". I guess I naively thought that GIMPS would start low, and work its way up to larger and larger numbers. Since that doesn't seem to be the case, perhaps some discussion of the search strategy would be warranted. How does GIMPS pick which numbers to test next, and how does it ensure it doesn't retest numbers which have already been ruled out? -- 128.104.112.114 ( talk) 13:32, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Have you read Isaac Asimov's articles about Prime Numbers and Skewes Numbers? WFPM ( talk) 23:03, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
" … eleven of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery." Shouldn’t that be 12 since Jan. 2013? Perhaps this statement is altogether of little interest, PR, and might be omitted? – Fritz Jörn ( talk) 05:26, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
IDK WikiEdit SOP, so I made a code comment. This paragraph isn't finished - it merely defines the awards associated with primes without defining how GIMPS taxes the winner, which is the whole reason I came to this article. Again, I have never been moved to do this so my apologies for peeing in your corner of the sandbox. PeasKraut Zef2Def Comment made in article [7] by 2601:98A:700:1F80:D416:CF76:213C:9E72 and moved to talk by Meters 07:35, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 05:06, 16 September 2018 (UTC)