Holy new Mersenne prime, Batman! (M47 related)

[T.Rex]

My verification of the candidate found the 6th of september is 15% done.
Tony

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by T.Rex

My verification of the candidate found the 6th of september is 15% done.
Tony

Wouldn't it make more sense to post these updates in the other thread?

[rgiltrap]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Or maybe it is real big and Sun decided to allow one BIG bruiser of a machine to be allowed to run it. Showing off the power a new machine, "the x-35 completed a verification run of a 10M digit number in 15 days, while the X-47b completed a verification of a 25M digit number in only 5 days."

That would be our new processor... the Niagara on Viagra

[ixfd64]

According to the prize rules, some of the money will be awarded to the discoverers of previous Mersenne primes.

If you were to find a 10,000,000 digit prime today the above rules imply that $3,333 would go to Michael Cameron, discoverer of the 39th known Mersenne prime, $3,333 would go to Michael Shafer, discoverer of the 40th known Mersenne prime, $3,333 would go to Josh Findley, discoverer of the 41st known Mersenne prime, $3,333 would go to Dr. Martin Nowak, discoverer of the 42nd known Mersenne prime, $6,667 would go to Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone the discoverers of the 43rd and 44th known Mersenne prime, $5,000 would go to GIMPS, $25,000 would go to charity, and $50,000 would go to you.

If Cooper and Boone discover a qualifying prime, does this mean they will get $56,667 instead of $50,000?

[argilo]

I just sent the following note to Quirks & Quarks, CBC Radio's science program (http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/):

Hi there.

Back on October 26, 1996 Quirks & Quarks reported on the launch of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Since that time, the project has discovered 10 world-record primes, and two more have been discovered in recent weeks. (They will likely be announced within the next week, once verification is complete. See http://mersenne.org/ for updates.) It is likely that at least one of the newly discovered primes will be over 10 million digits long, thus qualifying for a $100,000 EFF Cooperative Computing Award. Thus I think now would be a wonderful time to do a follow-up report on the GIMPS project. I hope you will consider it.

Regards,
Clayton Smith
GIMPS participant since 1998
Ottawa, Ontario

I'll let you know if I hear anything back.

The October 26, 1996 program I alluded to is listed here: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/96-97/oct2696.htm

Unfortunately I can't find the audio online. The link to it is broken.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by ixfd64

According to the prize rules, some of the money will be awarded to the discoverers of previous Mersenne primes.



If Cooper and Boone discover a qualifying prime, does this mean they will get $56,667 instead of $50,000?

And I think that giving someone $50K merely for blindly running someone
else's code is ridiculous. The money should go to George for his (terrific!)
intellectual achievement in developing and providing the code. It should
also go to Richard Crandall for developing the mathematics that made the
code possible. (i.e. for developing the theory of the DWT). I would suggest
that it should also go to L & L, but that is clearly difficult :-)

I can see giving a small award to compensate for costs (e.g. electricity).
But the actual discovery was made by a MACHINE, not a person. The
credit should go to those who made the discovery possible. Blindly
running someone else's code is not an achievement IMO.

[axn]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

And I think that giving someone $50K merely for blindly running someone
else's code is ridiculous. The money should go to George for his (terrific!)
intellectual achievement in developing and providing the code.

Assuming that the latest prime is > 10M, it is George/GIMPS that gets the money (all 100K of it). GIMPS will then subsequently redistribute the money as per the T&C. EFF has nothing to do with that.

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

It should
also go to Richard Crandall for developing the mathematics that made the
code possible. (i.e. for developing the theory of the DWT). I would suggest
that it should also go to L & L, but that is clearly difficult :-)

Well, if the prize was for developing algorithm, then sure. But it isn't. http://www.eff.org/awards/coop -- The award is for promoting cooperative internet computing -- IOW, "blindly running someone else's code".

Maybe, you should take up the matter with the donor of the prize money

[drew]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

And I think that giving someone $50K merely for blindly running someone
else's code is ridiculous.

The potential $50,000 award is no doubt an incentive for many of the people who run GIMPS. You can look at it as a raffle where the ticket price is the cost of the electricity and the CPU usage that goes into performing these computations. Without the promise of a prize, I bet GIMPS would not have managed this accomplishment at all.

Surely all of the computational capabilities GIMPS benefits from is worth more than $50,000 (in cost, at least). I think it's a cheap price to pay.

Of course, I certainly wouldn't take away from the accomplishments of the people you mentioned. It's all a tremendous achievement. Unfortunately, there's some supply/demand dynamics that apply. Although this is difficult and impressive work, it isn't that valuable to too many people.

Drew

[jinydu]

How are the 2 remaining verifications of "M_Sept." doing?

[Jwb52z]

Guys, please stop trying to reason with Dr. Silverman. He can't, or won't, understand that people deserve anything unless they "reinvent the wheel" and do things from scratch. He's an academic elitist, plain and simple. He has nothing but contempt and disdain and other pejoratives for people who aren't on his level, but still try to want things he doesn't think they "deserve" because they didn't do anything he thinks is deserving of anything. Granted, he will either gripe at me for posting this or ignore me as someone not worthy of a response. It is pointless to have a conversation with someone who is that certain of their own rightness and completeness about a topic or someone with such a worldview.

[henryzz]

i am beginning to think that we should just ignore anything he posts like that and just continue what we were discussing
the number of discussions he has interupted and stopped lately is quite large