What Is: World's Largest Known Prime Number

[God1405241522 0]

Holy lord thats one hell of a number ok im gonna try and breack it Mwhahahaha

 

1, 2, 4, 6..

[demolaynyc 0]

To me I think this project is so pointless. I don't even think there is a highest prime number in the world because numbers can go up to infinity. If the goal is to make up the highest prime number you can think of and win a prize, then that would be ok, but if you seriously try to look for the highest prime number there is--you're just simple stupid.

[seec77 0]

I don't think it's a quest for the largest prime number there is...

Sorry to be so rude, but you would think that people who coordinated such a large project are somewhat of mathematicians themselves, and even that is over-qualification for knowing there is no largest anything in mathematics. It's just a quest to keep on finding prime numbers that are higher than the largest one currently known. Of course this quest will never end. Each time that we reach a large prime number the one above it will take more computational power to find, but at the same time human technology will be progressing and will allow for that extra CPU speed. I tend to think that the time it takes to find each new prime number is pretty static.

 

I tend to think that this is a really useless distributed computing project. I mean, there are things much more valuable to do with those idle CPU cycles, such as finding the cure for cancer, solving some cryptographic riddles, or maybe something else. What will finding large prime numbers help humanity in? I am very supportive of curiosity, and I know that discovery of more and more numbers might actually lead to discoveries in other areas that will help humanity in the long-term, but the term is just too long for my taste.

 

Distributed computing is an important subject! We must all persuade ourselves and others to lend something that is of no value to us (spare CPU time) to the common good!

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

In my opinion the breaking of records such as these are a salute to our amazing development in the transistor world. Hard to imagine that not so long ago, we had only bulky vacuum tubes at our disposal.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Interesting, maybe now we got to strap a bunch of Cell processor servers together and start finding more of these prime numbers.xboxrulz

[borlafu 0]

I don't think this is about human curiosity...

 

... running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.

The aim of this project is to find better numerical algorithms and to find where the limits of computer calculus is.

 

Maybe this problem has no direct or tangible objective, but it's a simple problem that makes cientists innovate and investigate to find tools to make easyer other tasks.