relative newcomer Excellent Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) broke a six-year drought by searching for the next great oasis in a desert of boring synthetic numbers.
The decimal number is 41,024,320 digits long, and it would take months to write the entire number. To put it simply, and it might be a little hard to understand, this is one less than the number 2 raised to the power of 136,279,841. The official title is M136279841.
Former NVIDIA employee Luke Durant started contributing to the search last October, and had a little more success than a beginner’s luck. Durant leveraged thousands of graphics processing unit servers across 24 data center regions in 17 countries to run the software on his behalf.
On October 11th this year, a server in Dublin reached candidate M136279841. The next day, another server in Texas gave Digital a high rating, confirming his legendary status as the new mathematical Optimus Prime.
Prime numbers count numbers greater than 1 that are not the product of two smaller numbers. At first glance, 2, 3, and 5 look pretty unassuming, as they share space on the number line with integers like 4 and 6, but they can be created with simple multiplication.
But the more you count, the more difficult it becomes to find numbers that aren’t so neatly divisible, leading to the question whether the numbers may eventually disappear.
To avoid the humiliation of having to take off your socks and start counting yourself. the answer is no. Prime numbers are an infinite resource. But that doesn’t mean it’s easier to find.
Even if you strip away the copious amounts of fancy hardware used by Durant and his friends, hunting monsters in their heyday hasn’t changed much since the 17th century. French monk Marine Mersenne He turned his attention to these remarkable numbers and left his mark on the method of finding the prime numbers of a particular flavor.
‘Mersenne prime number‘ takes the form 2n – 1. Of course, not all numbers in this form are prime. For example, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16, 1 less is 15 (3 and 5 combined). And not all prime numbers are Mersenne type.
But given that this approach is efficient for finding numbers like teeth Prime, and the fact that it is possible relatively easy to testSince its founding in 1996, GIMPS has culled 18 numerical gemstones from the vast dunes of composite materials, bringing the known total to 52.
Previous record holder – discovered in 2018 As calculated by Patrick Laroche of Ocala, Florida, 2 to the power 82,589,933 minus 1 is just 25 million digits short. LaRoche ran a free prime number search program on his hardware. In short, Durant’s success with a network of GPUs marks the beginning of a new era in Mersenne prime search.
So why bother finding such huge numbers in the first place? Fame, bragging rights, and a chance to win Apart from the prize moneyno big deal.
George Waltman, co-founder of GIMPS, said ben brush washington post“Entertainment for math geeks.”
A large prime number is Encryption typeIndeed, despite the digital safe-cracking power of quantum computing on the horizon; Maybe those days were like that – shall we say – numbered.
Prime numbers, considered atoms of all positive integers, have their own beauty. Undoubtedly, the brand new Mersenne Prime will soon appear in the ever-expanding array of smart technology banks around the world.
It ranks 53rd on the list. Prime number.
