All you have to do is find a prime number with 1 billion digits. Piece of cake isn't it...
The prime number mystery has had many scientists and mathematicians scratching their heads for a long time now. The largest known prime number today is 243,112,609-1 with nearly 13 million digits. Printing out all 13 million digits in 12-point type would create a number 30 miles long!! It makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits!!
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a computing project that uses volunteers’ computers to hunt for primes, found the prime. It has claimed a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being the first to find a prime number that has more than 10 million digits.
Its really weird no that till now the greatest minds in the world have not figured out a way how the prime numbers are distributed or an effective way to find the primality of any given number. The most obvious way to go about identifying any prime number is to try factoring it. First, try dividing by 3, then 5, then 7, etc., and if none of them work, you’ve got a prime. But the last time a new prime was identified this way was in 1588, because as the numbers get bigger, the division takes longer and longer. So mathematicians have developed clever tests for primeness that are simpler to compute. The best one of all, called the Lucas-Lehmer test, only works for Mersenne primes. Remarkably, the method requires no division at all, making it extremely quick. The reason being the simple expression of Mersenne numbers .... 2n-1.
One thing is for sure the efforts for finding the largest prime number is creating new prospects in the field of cooperative, distributed computing. The only way to find these humongous numbers is by linking multiple computers together and using their combined processing power. Just to get a hint of it .... testing a billion-digit number on a single desktop computer would take it more than 500 years.
Whats the point of these endeavors ... well the most obvious contribution can be in Cryptography... so this research is of great value to secret service agencies ..... " A Beautiful Mind" flashback
Just wiki "Prime Numbers"....
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hmmm...interesting. These english ppl don't need to worry about bread and butter so they can do it but in pakistan...countries like pakistan don't have resources to invest on these types of activities. Interesting find though
ReplyDeleteTell me, whats the use of a prime number with 1 billion digits?
ReplyDelete@MAK: exactly
ReplyDelete@talhaabid: frankly... i dont know ... but as i said .... in the process of finding it ... the mathematicians and scientists will have to dig deep into the core maths and come up with effective algorithms ... this is for the good of maths... and then there is distributed computing ... which will get explored..
look do u want the $250,000 or not? :D