Skip to content

Hunting Million-Digit Primes from My Loft

primecrunch.com
32 pointsandyhedges6 comments
On HN

Comments

If you ran SETI@home or Folding@home back when that was a thing

SETI@home is gone but Folding@home is still very much a thing. There are currently 133 active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary

Could you make the tracking a little bit better for the website? I turned off my machine but it is still saying "Active" and the compute time keeps increasing on the website.

Just curious - is there any practical significance/use of such large primes, other than publishing?

Very large primes are not a particularly useful result.

The mathematical tools which people develop along the way to finding them can be useful for other number theory problems.

The largest known prime could be considered a universal scientific benchmark.

It is also a concise statement that is trivial to verify.

(by "trivial" meaning much much easier to verify than to discover in the first place)

seems fun. like boinc. i wish there was more boinc.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.