A great thing when the mission objective is achieved!
 

Lucky Curtis Cooper, but everyone's effort matters.

:bow:

The new prime's gravitational pull brought in some unusual number of sattelites:
two Fermat factors in as many days,
and now, a new aliquot merge... :rolleyes:

Congratulations to all involved, and Best Wishes for the next success! :curtisc:

[QUOTE=swl551;326771]Lucky Curtis Cooper, but everyone's effort matters.

:bow:[/QUOTE]Agreed!
But remember Gary Player's remark:
"The more I practise, the luckier I get".
(golf)

David

[QUOTE=ewmayer;326529]But that is at best an average property having zilch (or very nearly zilch) to do with the magnitude of any given new prime found.[/QUOTE]
I have to concur with Phil on this one (as usual).
If one asks "When will this unstable particle decay?" the best answer you can give consists of a single parameter: eg the lifetime or the half-life.

Therein lies the beauty and simplicity of things Poisson.

David

[QUOTE=davieddy;326644]One slight oversight there:
Computing clout required goes as exponent[SUP]3[/SUP]

D[/QUOTE]

OK, so to go from Colquitt/Welsh to Cooper^3 required a 500^3 = 125,000,000-fold increase in computing power over 25 years. To go from Cooper^3 to the first billion-digit test will require a 60^3 = 216,000-fold increase from what we have now. That seems eminently doable in the next 25 years.

Note that Moore's Law (doubling of power every 18 months) predicts a factor of 2^(25/1.5) = 104,000 increase in computing power over a 25-year span. We have seemingly outdone this by *three orders of magnitude* since 1988. It seems absurd to think we can't simply *double* it over the next 25 years.

You are all forgetting [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_%28computer_scientist%29"]May's Law[/URL]...

[QUOTE=NBtarheel_33;326827]OK, so to go from Colquitt/Welsh to Cooper^3 required a 500^3 = 125,000,000-fold increase in computing power over 25 years. To go from Cooper^3 to the first billion-digit test will require a 60^3 = 216,000-fold increase from what we have now. That seems eminently doable in the next 25 years.

Note that Moore's Law (doubling of power every 18 months) predicts a factor of 2^(25/1.5) = 104,000 increase in computing power over a 25-year span. We have seemingly outdone this by *three orders of magnitude* since 1988. It seems absurd to think we can't simply *double* it over the next 25 years.[/QUOTE]

You're using questionable methodology here. Moore's law pertains to the capability of an individual chip/machine. However, the relevant metric here is total computing power. For that you need to factor in amount of participation. The constant for Moore's law is somewhere b/w 24 & 36 months now-a-days. It might actually slow down further, with increasing focus on mobile/power-optimized computing.

Personally, I am not very optimistic about your projection. In 25 years, we might have found 100 million digit prime(s) -- but even that's on the optimistic side :sad:

[QUOTE=axn;326833]You're using questionable methodology here. Moore's law pertains to the capability of an individual chip/machine. However, the relevant metric here is total computing power. For that you need to factor in amount of participation.[/QUOTE]

Which is on its way up. 95 TFLOPS in November, 125+ TFLOPS today. 30,000 additional registered CPUs in the same time frame. The new prime (and any subsequent discoveries) will boost these numbers.

[QUOTE]The constant for Moore's law is somewhere b/w 24 & 36 months now-a-days. It might actually slow down further, with increasing focus on mobile/power-optimized computing. [/QUOTE]

I agree, and this has been a concern of mine. If we see a large percentage of the desktop user base go the way of the dodo in favor of tablets and mobile devices that are either not powerful enough to run GIMPS, or have incompatible CPUs, this could be a dent in our throughput. The flip side of this is that there is beaucoup processing power out there in mobile devices if we can only somehow effectively harness it. I made the remark a while back that my Samsung Galaxy II Skyrocket has a dual-core processor (1.5 GHz, I believe) and a gig of RAM. This is more power than my desktop had in 2001. It would be wonderful to one day dial up (no pun intended) an LL or P-1 (or even TF) assignment on my phone!

[QUOTE]Personally, I am not very optimistic about your projection. In 25 years, we might have found 100 million digit prime(s) -- but even that's on the optimistic side :sad:[/QUOTE]

I wonder how high George thought we'd get when he started in 1996. His P-90 would literally have taken decades to complete an LL assignment that takes a week on new hardware. Technological advancement is full of surprises.

[QUOTE=LaurV;326830]You are all forgetting [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_%28computer_scientist%29"]May's Law[/URL]...[/QUOTE]

Not as long as George is at the helm of Prime95 development.

[QUOTE=NBtarheel_33;326838]Not as long as George is at the helm of Prime95 development.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, he might make the calculus faster, but displaying windows (or respective command prompt/text mode on mprime) is on the OS side and that will take 90% of the time... and become slower in time... :razz:

(this is good for the "[URL="http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=17438"]wish[/URL]" thread, hehe)