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New World's Biggest Prime · Acedra
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New World's Biggest Prime
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0:00
big news everyone there's a new world's biggest prime number it's a meren prime and today we're going to hear directly from the man who discovered it you're going to be amazed at the lengths he went to and you're going to be a little bit surprised at the amount of money he spent as well I'm not doing my job as a journalist if I don't ask then what does it cost to find a meren prime we're also going to talk with the founder of the great internet meren Prime search which
0:25
played a key role and find out what he thinks all about it progress was kind of slow until Luke came along and and put his supercomputer to work but first let's hear from our resident prime number Enthusiast Dr James Grime meren Prime is a prime number of course you know famous prime numbers building blocks of all of the numbers but the meren primes is one of those special categories of primes uh in this case a meren prime is one less than a power of two powers of two can get very big very
0:58
quickly so they would start with 2 4 8 16 32 and so on we're looking at one less than the powers of two so instead of saying 4 8 16 32 we're looking at one less than that so what's that going to be 3 7 15 which is not a prime 31 which is a prime though some of these are primes and some of them are not primes they're kind of useful to for us for checking large prime numbers because the test for checking whether they're prime or not is particularly easy to do on
1:34
Modern computers the meren primes always caught my eye you know in and of themselves because they're so close to Computing powers of two Etc um and I kind of sort of converged around it's a you know physicists keep talking about you know information in the universe being an important you know first principle so let me go try to find a new Unique Piece of big information and you know see if that helps me you know helps guide my think about large numbers so we famously see them written
2:09
like as 2 to the nus one but not all n's work yes so that's right so we can show that if your m n number which would be 2 to the^ n minus one that power that n could be any number you want but we can show that that number must be a prime for the meren number to be a prime I mean in this case which is exciting so the the big prime number that we found here is 41 million digits long huge number absolutely huge but the exponent that we're using for our power of two is
2:47
what nine digits long uh so yes you can just use a list of primes work through that and then the result is absolutely huge six years I think it's been since you last had one pretty close late 2018 how do you feel were you beginning to wonder if it was ever going to happen again well progress was kind of slow until Luke came along and and put his super computer to work uh once he did that I was pretty sure we'd find one within two or three years no one was really treating it as a
3:24
race um you know is just sort of uh you know put it into the bucket see if it comes out eventually and you know I'm looking at it it's been it had been about the longest period of time ever since a new meren Prime had been discovered at least through the gimps program my background at my former employer was very much you know if computing's too slow throw some gpus at it so I you know figured I have some budget I have some interest I'm going to see if I can you
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know basically do pr iCal accelerated Computing great internet meren Prime search yeah so this has been going since the '90s is that right uh looking for these large meren primes it's an exercise they say it's an exercise in Hardware computer power uh just as an exercise in Computing and solving this problem throw my personal gpus at it a little bit okay I didn't find one within my patient which is not as long as it might be basically kept redoubling find what
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cloud gpus were available I shifted sort of through most of the major Cloud providers over time eventually converging on one or two that I could get the best you know price and availability and specs on um at some point I had to form the durable science LLC you know company to you know have a sufficiently official you know home for the project the big tech companies aren't super interested in license you know selling compute resources at the scale I'm doing to you know private
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individuals so you know put a company there to have some respectability the actual finding of these mer and primes themselves they're not necessarily useful but it is kind of it's kind of a a note in history it's a step along the way in history and to be someone who finds one of these primes I mean that's that's that's bragging rights you seem to me speaking to you like a guy who's pretty calm and doesn't get particularly excited were you like were you jumping off the walls or what was going
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on uh I was actually um waiting outside the San Jose security airport line you know the TSA check-in um when I was logging in to check my result because I knew it would you know show up right about then you know Sol the primality sent it in and got in my got in the security line uh I was maybe less excited than I could have been because travel is always a bit of a strain so it's kind of a lot going on yeah that's a it's a bummer that I had to be an airport queue they're the worst places in the
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world right well take the result and whatever the circumstances you know in the past we had uh missed a couple of primes because they just sat in the database and it's supposed to automatically email me when it when one comes comes in and and that failed so he wanted to let me know don't miss this one okay so uh it was pretty exciting and I think Luke was pretty excited too yeah in his understated way I haven't actually spoken to him we it's all been done by email with Luke so
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it was it was it actually pretty exciting to me to you know reach a scale of you know it it's genuinely a global supercomputer you know put together in my office and found a unique result it's pretty fun what do you think of meren Prime cost these days what does it cost to find a meren prime give me a number
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um honestly I stopped tracking carefully I I have it all so I can go recollect I believe it's under two million yeah that's a hefty chunk of change we you don't have to spend money to do this I think that was Luke's decision I think that was Luke's Choice how do you feel about how much effort he's put into it though and how much of himself he's given to it it's pretty special isn't it it's it's staggering how much how many results his super supercomputer using
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gpus puts out I mean before he started we were getting like 300 tests a day and at at his Peak he was turning in 3500 a day does it feel like you does it feel amazing does it feel like just another stamp in the stamp collection or does this number feel special to you um this number feels special but it's you know any project has its components that are important you know the the um you know this one gets the headlines but it's you know hard to rate this over you
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know the scope of work that went into putting the GPU platform together in the first place and of course I'm not taking the credit for that what's the point of this it's fun I mean we do things for fun all the time I me the joy of Discovery uh for me personally I enjoy the computer programming Pro which is optimizing the the whole process from the program written to the algorithms used that's my joy uh other people who download the program they they like each
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time you test one of these things you have a one in a million shot of of finding a new Prime and having a little bit of Glory so you know for different people they get different things out of it I saw an incredibly talented set of you know scientists and Engineers that put some remarkable new software and Technology together in primality proving large number multiplication etc etc and you know they didn't have big corporate support so you know okay I've had some
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ability to chip in so you see if I can emphasize and bring some light to some good work going on elsewhere in the world anyone can do it with their own home computer they can download the gimps program they're taking part in my head gimps was always like you know the little man and the little woman running a computer in their office hoping they're going to be the one to strike at lucky I mean this is this is get industrial now yeah well I guess that depends upon Luke it could go back to
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the old mom and pop shops uh uh finding the next prime or he might stick with it I I don't know how many how much of his resources he wants to devote to Future computing honestly I felt a tiny bit bad about the uh disruption I caused on the you know meren Prime wavefront you know I sort of threw so much Computing at it that it sort of made all of their backlog and double-checking a little bit messy because I spread out the search so much so right now I've shifted the
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computer to work on the double-checking backlog for a little bit so that's kind of the less glamorous work cuz more likely than not you're just going to confirm the ones that aren't primes you're not going to find a new shiney Superstar right and so that means we've just found our 52nd M Prime means we also have just found our 52nd ever perfect number uh a perfect number that is 82 million digits long so you've also found a new perfect number I guess haven't you it's pretty
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exciting I I have not gone and confirm that all the devisers work out myself but I will trust it are you more excited about the meren or the perfect number um I know the two go hand in hand of course I'm a little bit more excited about fewer day-to-day monitorings of my supercomputer this it's been a big uh ongoing monitoring project to keep it on the rails hey everyone if you'd like to see the full interviews with both Luke and George I'm going to put them on the
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number File 2 channel do go and have a look there's loads more information a lot more context they're really worth watching not just the headline grabbing stuff that we popped in this video I'll also include links to other videos we've made over the years about perfect numbers meren primes prime numbers in general there's going to be a bounty of links in the description and in the comment section go and have a look they're they're pretty excited my my dad is a music professor at University of
12:25
South Alabama and he was uh possibly leaking the news to a of his math colleagues at a concert last week we suspect we are well we're definitely the first people to have ever printed it out I suspect we're still the only people to have ever printed it out because that is over two million digits printed
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