Spike Jones wrote:
>
>Can anyone think of any way to *prove* the level of sophistication
>of our current society, better than a list of Mersenne primes? spike
You can never *prove* your level of sophistication to a less sophisticated
society with a mere list of Mersenne primes. They would have no way to
know if it was correct. When this discussion started, I think the point
was how impressive Lucas Lehmer testing is compared to brute force
factoring. Without LL (or equivalent) AND the computational ability to
carry it out exhaustively for all candidates up to the largest member of
the list, they wouldn't be able to verify the list and would have to take
it on faith. (They might well be impressed if they chose to believe the
claim, but it won't have been *proven*.) In order to *prove*
sophistication to a non LL society, we would have to teach them the Lucas
Lehmer theorum, unfortunately a lot trickier than sending a list of numbers.
Todd Sauke
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