| Product: |
mersenne.org/primenet |
| Date: |
19/08/00 (22 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Chance of big money
Disadvantages: Very slim chance of big money
PrimeNet are all about prime numbers. Their aim in life is to find big prime numbers. When I say big, I really do mean big. PrimeNet now lay claim to the three biggest known prime numbers, the last one having over two million decimal digits.
Prime numbers do have real world applications. The most significant to us all on-line being their use in encryption.
PrimeNet are one of the longest established distributed computing organisations, having been around for over three years. Since the beginning they’ve been all about the mathematical challenge, never money. It therefore came as a bit of a shock when on the 31st March 1999 the Electronic Frontier Foundation offered big prizes for future finds. $50K for the first 1M digit number, $100K for 10M, $150K for 100M, and $250K for one billion digits. The reason for the prizes being the challenge of bringing people and ideas together on the net.
The $50K went very quickly – 23rd June 1999. Since then all quiet.
The offer of cash has caused some serious problems. Computing power has not moved along at the rate that numbers have been processed. In the early days it took only a few days to check a single number. Now to check a 10M digit number on a P3-500 will take one year! Do date only 621 brave soles have begun processing numbers of this magnitude, but not one has yet completed.
The heart of the project is a small piece of software that runs in the background scooping up idle time. The user has the options of three types of work: factoring, LL-checking or doubling-checking. Factoring checks some of the smaller combinations, but will always result in a ‘no it’s not prime’ or ‘it might be prime’. Very quick, but no credit. LL-checking now takes about one month on a P3-500 for the smallest numbers on offer, this will result in a yes/no result. If you’re lucky enough to find a prime number, you’re promised a share
of the $100K when that’s ultimately won. Double-checking simply rechecks to guard against errors, so as slow as LL-checking, but this time no credit.
The software works really well, and the web site is regularly updated. The only problem – it’s so boring. I ran the client for about six months solid, but got really depressed every time by the end result – ’99.98%’…‘99.99%’ 230; ‘Number is not prime’… ‘Starting next 0.00% complete’.
Summary:
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