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Eugene Leitl wrote: With molecular scale computing elements, a >small chunkof this computronium[63] would have more memory and >processing power than all of the computers in the world today combined...
speaking of all the computers in the world combined, i have recently started using my computer's downtime to search for mersenne primes. you can go to this website, download the program, it requests work from a central server which organizes and distributes the compuing task.
http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
my computer has spent the past 4 days, and will continue for about 15 more, trying to determine if 2^6004153-1 is prime. if so, it will become the 38th known mersenne prime. the process works at the lowest level so you do not know it is running. anything preempts it, except screen savers. it is somehow satisfying to know this computer is spending its off time actually *doing* something besides sitting there asking "whatdoido?whatdoido?whatdoido?" 400 million times a second.
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Eugene Leitl wrote: With molecular scale computing elements, a
>small chunkof this computronium[63] would have more memory and
>processing power than all of the computers in the world today combined...
speaking of all the computers in the world combined, i have recently
started using my computer's downtime to search for mersenne primes.
you can go to this website, download the program, it requests work
from
a central server which organizes and distributes the compuing task.
http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
my computer has spent the past 4 days, and will continue for about
15 more, trying to determine if 2^6004153-1 is prime. if so,
it will
become the 38th known mersenne prime. the process works at the
lowest level so you do not know it is running. anything preempts
it,
except screen savers. it is somehow satisfying to know this computer
is spending its off time actually *doing* something besides sitting
there
asking "whatdoido?whatdoido?whatdoido?" 400 million times a second.
primes may not turn everyone on. what if distributed task background
computing became popular. what else could you think of to use
all
that idle computer time? spike
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