At 07:49 PM 10/06/99 -0700, you wrote:
>> > My apologies for being so inane, but I wonder whether the EFF *b*illion
>> > digit prime prize or SETI will happen first, too...
>>
> [Gilmore, John (AZ75)] Unless someone comes up with a MUCH faster
> algorithm, or a parallelizable algorithm, since a 90 GHz Pentium
> would take (to one significant figure) 80 years to test _one_ exponent, my
> guess would be SETI (assuming, of course, that there actually _is_ ETI out
> there)
On a Pentium 90, testing a single billion digit mersenne number would
take 3.3 billion iterations @ around 15 minutes each (with sufficient
memory!), meaning about 1500 years.
There are about 150 million primes less than 3.3*10^9, and at the current
rate, we seem to do LL tests on 1/3 of them.
So we are about 7.5*10^10 P90 years away from our first billion digit prime.
Following conservative estimates of cpu power and number of participants
doubling every two years, I'd guess that we will have a our first billion
digit prime in 2021, when we have 40 million participants and Pentium XV
1000GHz processors.
> I'm not counting on seeing either in my lifetime.
Well, I still plan on seeing it in my lifetime. ;-)
Colin Percival
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