|
|
Poker.co.uk - Poker News Archive
Wednesday 16th June 2004 Poker player finds major prime number
Meet Josh Findley, 31, a Portland native and professional poker player and IT consultant. Now, think of the biggest number you can and then double it, triple it, and quadruple it.
Findley stands out in the tens of thousands of people who join him in a strange, numeric quest for the largest prime number known to man. Prime numbers can only be divided by themselves and one - for instance, three, seven or 37. They have a certain cachet in math circles. Mersenne primes are a rare type that can be expressed as 2 to some power, minus 1. But because of the size of the numbers involved, the search for the biggest Mersenne is also the search for the biggest prime overall.
The prime number discovered by Findley is in the realm of say, 7.2 million; it has 7.2 million digits. Officially, it’s 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1. The pokie player is also now a successful, member of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. GIMPS, for short.
Last month, while on business in New Jersey, his PC back home in Issaquah, Wash., found the big number. Pretty soon, every math maniac from Brazil to New Zealand were clicking their cursors on the news.
Findley's computer discovered the number mostly by luck, and the calculations are done without human interference. But he had been part of GIMPS for five years, devoting countless hours of computer power to checking off numbers one at a time. Right after the largest number is discovered, the search resumes for the next-largest number. Findley's discovery came six months after the last number was found.
And despite all the effort, the numbers aren't actually that useful to science. However, since 1996, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search has discovered seven of the largest known prime numbers. The latest discovery is the 41st known Mersenne prime.
George Woltman, a retired computer programmer with a passion for numbers, founded the prime number project Merseene.org eight years ago says: ‘It's kind of like a rare gem. There’s just something intrinsically beautiful (about something) that cannot be divided by any smaller number. It’s comparable the search to climbing Mount Everest. It's been done before, but you get to claim you've climbed the highest peak.’
To create GIMPS, 75,000 computers are linked to a central server, which then crunches out numbers in a sequence to be tested. Anyone in the world can join and share their computer's spare processing time to the larger effort, similar to the SETI.org project.
Source: OnlineCasinoNews
|
| |
|
