At 12:14 PM 6/27/99 -0400, you wrote:
>How large will the exponent be for a 10,000,000 digit prime number?
P will be over 33,000,000 or roughly thereabouts. I'm sure someone can
give a more precise number.
>Has the prime number that was found a week ago been announced on this list?
>I.E. What number was it?
George has announced that the number that was suspected prime has been
confirmed to be prime by different hardware and algorithms. Because of
the EFF award money rules, we "GIMPS at large" will not be permitted to
know what the exponent was, or who discovered it, until an article has been
published in a peer-review academic research magazine or such.
George has said he is working on getting such a publication, but that no
publication date has been set. If he were to announce the prime NOW,
prior to publication, however, it COULD void the discoverer's claim to the
prize money, so I understand the caution in talking about it.
I suspect that were we to find another one between 1MM and 9.9MM digits,
where no prize money was at stake, that the announcement would be more
along the lines of M37 -- Slowinski or someone else confirming it, and just
getting it published in a newspaper. George has frequently used the SJ
Mercury News for that (in our last three discoveries). With the prize
money at stake, it is different.
>Slovinski used to test huge numbers of primes...is he still doing that?
While I don't know him from Adam, David SLOWINSKI (with a w) still works at
Cray, and still uses whatever spare CPU time he can locate to hunt for
primes.
I *suspect* that in light of GIMPS' success, he is likely looking much
higher than we are now (and has been for some time, again as a guess). He
knows our current program cannot top P > 20,000,000, so I suspect he's
above that range, perhaps by a good margin. It may be that he breaks GIMPS
record(s) again someday. I do know that the last time George expanded
Prime95 to hunt up to 20MM (up from 3MM), that George sent several residues
in the upper ranges to David for confirmation, and that David was able to
confirm SOME of them rather quickly (faster than a Cray could do the
calculations on the spot, so they were already tested). This to me
indicates that David is searching the numbers far above our top potential
range, especially since a Cray can test such numbers in about a week or
two, as a guess.
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