I am fine today. Continue from yesterday…
The PRIME95 is exactly the software that Heng Chiek used to perform “stress test” or “torture test” on the super fast computer that I mentioned on Day +678 : An update of the super fast computer. When I wanted to find out more information about the software, I came to know this prime search effort.
The software will get some searching job from the GIMPS server and then report the result back to the server. You need a lot patience to do this.
“Testing a single 10,000,000 digit number takes two months on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 computer. Your chance of success is roughly 1 in 250,000. Someone may find a 10,000,000 digit prime before GIMPS does,” GIMPS warned :-(
Apart from money and the thrill of possibly breaking record and make history, is there other reasons that one should join the search? Yes, read them here.
The last found Mersenne Prime (44th) is 232,582,657-1. It is a 9,808,358 digit number found by Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone on 4 September 2006.
How big is the number? Wikipedia helps us to appreciate the size of the 44th Mersenne Prime:
“To help visualize the size of the 44th known Mersenne prime, it would require 2,616 pages to display the number in base 10 with 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page.”
This is equivalent to the thickness of one and 2/3 of Bible given the approximate size of a Bible is 1500 pages. Just imagine how big the number is! The next Mersenne Prime (45th) must be a lot longer than this.
If you are interested at this number or would like to join the effort in finding this number, please visit the following website:
See you next post :-)
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