I guess I'm much more straightforward in my thinking... "why not?" :)
We have all those unused cpu cycles, just itching for something to do besides run NOP loops... why not put that wasted electricity to use. I don't believe in ET's, and while some of the projects like the protein folding are interesting, they should at least get paid for using their computers to do research work like that since somewhere, sometime, someone's gonna make money out of whatever they come up with from that. :) Cracking cryptography is interesting, but the way they went about those projects, just throwing massive horsepower at a factoring problem, by trying every possible key combination... it certainly lacked finesse. It got the job done, but didn't really prove anything useful that we didn't already know (throw enough horsepower at cracking encryption and you can do it eventually... gee... who would have guessed that?) Something about the pure theory behind Mersenne primes has a certain sex appeal. The number itself is of little use, besides as a curiosity perhaps, just like knowing the billionth digit of pi. Then again, maybe we'll learn something about prime number distributions, Mersennes in particular, but you won't know until you find more of them to be able to make predictions to be able to formulate some formulas... :) Just never know... The algorithms used to test for primality have been advanced quite a bit, and it's a good thing that Mssrs. Lucas and Lehmer didn't just throw up their hands and say "well, it's of little practical use to find mersenne primes, so why bother". The LL algorithm is pretty neat, and I can only imagine that it has some practical applications elsewhere, besides looking for big prime numbers. Maybe not, what do I know, I'm just a sys admin with a mild fascination with math. :) Aaron -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid-reply-address@;base.com] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 10:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mersenne: Uses for large primes (Was: dissed again) Del Brand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I always get asked what is the purpose or use for such large prime >numbers. Since I'm not a math geek, I don't know what to tell them. Well, the prime numbers GIMPS has discovered are so overwhelmingly large as to make them completely impractical for (present-day) cryptographic purposes that the old saw about "more secure cryptography" doesn't hold water. I always tell people that it's not the numbers themselves that are of practical importance - rather, it's the algorithms that are developed to manipulate them efficiently that are important. For example, efficient large-integer arithmetic is important both in basic number-theoretic research and in applications such as cryptography. Fast transform arithmetic (which we use to perform the large-integer multiplies that are the rate-limiting operation in most primality-testing algorithms) has a huge range of applicability, from the signal processing that goes on every time one makes a call on a mobile phone to analysis of scientific data. Being able to squeeze a factor of 2-5x in speed out of one's CPU (the typical speed ratio of the GIMPS' clients' FFTs versus various "industry standard" FFTs like that in Numerical Recipes or the like) via a well-crafted hardware implementation of the algorithm is also a useful thing. Personally, I need no immediate practical justification - I just find working at the interface between number theory and computer science to be endlessly fascinating - but for those who do, there is no lack of such. Cheers, -Ernst _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
