Oops - New Prime! (M49 related)

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by philmoore

Congratulations also to Aaron, who well-deserves being credited by name, and to Curtis Cooper, who just keeps on crunching!

I think that 'technically' Aaron is the discoverer. He is the human that first laid eyes on the info.

[robert44444uk]

The list of primes with 65 as smallest positive primitive root appears in the exponent

https://oeis.org/A114680

Important? Not! It is the first such value this is true.

Congrats to all involved in finding this though.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Mini-Geek

As usual, the news sites don't really know what they're talking about, and don't clearly state what they're trying to state.

This from the Forbes article is also problematic:

Most internet commerce is managed through variants of RSA encryption, which is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Having a supply of big primes to construct large composites is therefore desirable and GIMPS helps us find them.

Does anyone think that Mersenne primes are useful for e-commerce?

[ramshanker]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931234

Going steady.

[ATH]

Originally Posted by Mini-Geek

As usual, the news sites don't really know what they're talking about, and don't clearly state what they're trying to state.

Yeah I read the statement as almost certain to find a Mersenne Prime between 57M and 74M and I was being sarcastic about it.

There are certainly tons of "normal" primes that we will never find in that range


I trialfactored the associated perfectnumber + 1 up to 4.46*10¹² with no factor: http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=10336
(Btw I did find the factors 7 and 22127627 of the M57885161 perfectnumber + 1, and factors 3593 and 7089208037 for the M42643801 perfectnumber + 1 long ago, I just never got the thread updated).

Can any special form of the factors of M_p*(M_p+1)/2 + 1 = 2^p-1*(2^p - 1) + 1 = 2^2p-1 - 2^p-1 +1 be deduced?

[kracker]

Congrats all.. especially to Curtis Cooper(once again!)

[TheJudger]

Congrats to Curtis Cooper et al.
Another prove that GIMPS works!

Oliver

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by ixfd64

So... did anyone manage to guess the exponent before it was announced?

Surprisingly, no. The odd quirk I had noticed was that M74207281 as viewed on the exponent report clearly showed zero first time results, but the assignments for it were marked as double-checks. (EDIT: Incidentally, my comments about a "masked" residue were just a red herring on my part... there actually *is* such a feature in case the result were actually displayed, but it wasn't needed)

That owed to a quirk when the prime was found... for record keeping purposes the assignment is kept, unlike a normal assignment when the assignment is deleted. But there's also a bit of code that marks all existing assignments as double-checks when a first-time check comes in.

We left that quirk alone until just a few days before today, and I thought someone might stumble on that oddity and make the connection, but oh well... it was pretty obscure and maybe you'd really have to be looking for it.

Odds are we'll have that fixed for next time... it shouldn't really mark the assignment as a double-check in such a scenario, it just worked out that way.

EDIT: incidentally, the assignment history is no longer available, but there was one "anonymous" user who had that exponent previously but it had expired without any progress.

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

I think that 'technically' Aaron is the discoverer. He is the human that first laid eyes on the info.

George mentioned as much, and I humbly deferred to his judgment on whether I was worthy of co-discoverer status.

I didn't say it at the time, but when I was looking through the data and found this particular one, and especially who the submitter was, I knew it wasn't a typical false positive. Had it been some other random user, or "anonymous", I wouldn't have given it very good odds.

It was actually pretty nerve wracking for us, waiting for that double-check to finish up. It completed around 3 AM my time on Saturday, Jan 9 and I recall getting up early to check on it. I was not disappointed.

Regarding the lack of email notification, there's now a backup plan to the code that didn't seem to fire off the email. A nightly task looks for potential new primes and will fire off an email, so hopefully this solves the missing email quandary once and for all (although I still want to fix the real-time notification).

[ATH]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Regarding the lack of email notification, there's now a backup plan to the code that didn't seem to fire off the email. A nightly task looks for potential new primes and will fire off an email, so hopefully this solves the missing email quandary once and for all (although I still want to fix the real-time notification).

Good thing with a backup procedure. No sign of what caused the email to fail? This failure has happened on "several?" occasions, were there any cause found back then?

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

George mentioned as much, and I humbly deferred to his judgment on whether I was worthy of co-discoverer status.

I didn't say it at the time, but when I was looking through the data and found this particular one, and especially who the submitter was, I knew it wasn't a typical false positive.

I know I was the first human to know about M42603801 for the same reason as Aaron. When email notification works, there is no way to know which human is the first to open up the email to become the first human aware of a new prime.

Correct attribution all depends on one's definition of "discoverer".

BTW, it is a pretty cool feeling to be the only one on the planet to know about a new Mersenne prime.

[AG5BPilot]

Originally Posted by only_human

This from the Forbes article is also problematic:

Does anyone think that Mersenne primes are useful for e-commerce?

If the prize money is spent online, absolutely. :)