From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 02:16:51 MDT
Spike wrote:
> >Spike just for idle ignoramuses like myself what is the basis
> >(generally) for the interest in *really* big prime numbers and
> >their discovery...
>
> >I'm merely curious. Are there applications for this sort of thing?
> >Why Spike, Why? Brett Paatsch
>
> The topic came up on the Mersenne Search chat group: Guys,
> why the hell are we doing this?
>
.
> My notion is that a long list of Mersenne primes could
> be used as a gentle deterrence or a weapon of peace for
> any extraterrestrial civilizations we might contact. If
> we reveal our many resources, ET might be tempted to
> come here and devour same.
>
> But if we transmit a long list of Mersenne primes, (the
> same in any base, in any corner of the universe) we
> demonstrate that not only are we a clever species, we have
> computer resources to simply waste on foolishness. This
> could be easily extrapolated into our having a veritable
> firehose of technology. One would be ill advised to give
> humanity a reason to turn that firehose upon one.
> (nice doggie, niiiice doggie, while backing away slowly.)
Ah the classic "we speak softly but carry a long list of
Mersenne primes" deterrent. Very cunning.
> Gregory Stock made a pitch at Extro4 about the effect
> of cash prizes on research. We now have a perfect study
> case. The EFF prize turned out to have little impact
> that I can tell. The introduction of the Pentium 4
> had a large impact however.
>
> It is interesting to have a quantity that continues
> to double in size every 11 seconds for years. The size
> of the record largest prime doubles every 11 seconds
> on average for long stretches of time (~1 million
> decimal digit prime discovered on 27 Jan 1997, 2+ million
> digit prime discovered 1 June 1999, 4+ million digit
> prime discovered 14 November 2001.
Someone could nearly build a clock on the basis of such
a consistent phenomenon!
> The doubling time
> is actually getting shorter, as more people join GIMPS
> and CPUs get dramatically faster. Since we are currently
> searching near the 6 million digit mark, the doubling time
> is now under 10 seconds.
Well, never mind, we still have atomic clocks to fall back on.
> GIMPS reduces waste. If your background computing
> cycles are not being used by something, your computer
> is sitting there 99.9% of the time saying" whatdoIdo,
> whatdoIdo, whatdoIdo... over and over. If you buy a
> newer machine, it asks whatdoIdo much faster. We
> should be WORKING those idle CPUs.
Damn straight!
>
> It pleases me to know my idle CPU cycles are being used
> to advance science, even if in a kind of trivial way.
> But not really *that* trivial. We are making a map of
> nature here, a universal map.
And it's ok if our locale is denoted. We've deterred 'em.
> We don't know *for absolute
> sure* that the abundance of primes continues to follow
> logarithm rule for abundance. How would we know if they
> mysteriously began to thin out once one is way out in
> the kilothousand digit primes, beyond our ability to determine
> primeness?
Shudder!
> Well, the Mersenne primes have that wonderful
> shortcut to determine primeness, the Lucas Lehmer algorithm,
> which allows a primality test to be done millions of
> orders of magnitude more quickly than without it. In what
> other area do you know of that you can even logically
> use the phrase "millions of orders of magnitude" without
> any exaggeration at all?
Kinda makes one's reproductive potential seem small doesn't it.
.
> Heres the final thought. My friend Scott Kurowski
> volunteered his company's services (irony: it is called
> Entropia.com) to organize GIMPS. One would have to know
> Scott. He is the kind of guy who has money magnetism.
> If he walks thru a room, currency seems to chase him,
> struggling to get into his pocket. A generous person is
> he: at the last Mersenne party, he showed up and picked
> up the bill. There were 14 of us present.
>
> One wonders why Scott, the ultimate businessman, would
> spend money in this way. Then it occurred to me that
> GIMPS has generated a database of enormous value.
> Computers dont make mistakes often, but they do make
> mistakes, and the designs have bugs, such as the famous
> Pentium bug. GIMPS has been quietly collecting data for
> several years now on every kind of processor and every
> kind of operating system that is in the world today. When
> your processor makes a bad checksum, the result is logged.
> Scott can tell you what processor is best, Intel, AMD or
> Motorola. He can tell you if any particular operating system
> correlates with more checksum errors. He can tell you which
> combinations of processor and operating system works
> best.
Very cool !
>
> How much do you think this data is worth? To Intel? AMD?
> Motorola? How about HP, Dell, Micron and Gateway?
Hmm, dunno. But is Scott savvy to the notion of franchising?
>
> Ive been meaning to ask Scott if he planned all along
> to gather this database, or if it was just a fortunate
> accident, an unintended byproduct. What do you think?
Sorry that opinion is now commerial in confidence :-)
> Of course, if I win the 100 kiloclams, that would surpass
> the book thing as the biggest reward, but still the cite
> is way cool.
Well I just *knew* there *had* to be a rational explanation,
(or several).
As Sir Edmund Hillary was wont to say "we choose to go to
the top of Everest, and, do the other things, not because they
are easy but because they are hard" or something not at all
like that.
Go Spike.
- Brett Paatsch
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