The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in cooperation with Entropia.com,
Inc. and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, announces US
$50,000 for the first million digit prime.
--- EFF Press Release ---
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 31, 1999
EFF Offers Cooperative Computing Prizes
Netizens Encouraged to Enlist Idle Computers in the Name of Science
CONTACTS
Tara Lemmey, EFF Executive Director, +1 415 436 9333, x102,
E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
John Gilmore, EFF Co-Founder and project leader, +1 415 221 6524,
E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Landon Curt Noll, Cooperative Computing Awards advisor, +1 650 933
4168,
E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is
sponsoring
cooperative computing awards, with over half a million dollars in
prize
money, to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving
huge
scientific problems.
"We're providing incentives to stretch the computational capabilities
of
the Internet," said Tara Lemmey, EFF's Executive Director. "We hope
to
spur the technology of cooperative networking and encourage Internet
users
worldwide to join together in solving scientific problems involving
massive
computation. EFF is uniquely situated to sponsor these awards, since
part
of our mission is to encourage the harmonious integration of Internet
innovations into the whole of society," she added.
The prizes will be awarded for finding huge prime numbers, that is,
numbers
that can only be divided by 1 and themselves. The first million-digit
prime found will be worth $50,000; a ten-million-digit prime will
claim
$100,000; a hundred-million-digit prime garners $150,000; and the
finder of
the first billion-digit prime will receive $250,000. The largest
known
prime number, discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
(GIMPS), has 909,526 digits.
"The EFF awards are about cooperation," said John Gilmore, EFF
co-founder
and project leader for the awards. "Prime numbers are important in
mathematics and encryption, but the real message is that many other
problems can be solved by similar methods."
Finding these prime numbers will be no simple task, given today's
computational power. It has taken mathematicians years to uncover and
confirm new largest known primes. However, the computer industry
produces
millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time,
running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is
encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to
work
together to share this massive resource. In the process, EFF hopes to
inspire experts to apply collaborative computing to large problems,
and
thereby foster new technologies and opportunities for everyone.
Prizes and cooperative projects to find prime numbers or demonstrate
weaknesses in encryption systems have existed for some years, although
they
have not yet found mass market appeal. "The approach that we're
taking
with prime numbers could be used for other scientific problems, such
as
analyzing the human genome, weather prediction, or searching for signs
of
life in space," said Gilmore.
"In the long run, we hope to move beyond prizes," he said, "catalyzing
a
market where ordinary people can sell the spare time on their
computers to
others who need to compute something overnight on thousands or
millions of
machines. This would reduce the net cost of owning a personal
computer,
and open new opportunities in animation, product design, economics,
cryptanalysis, science, and business."
According to Landon Curt Noll, chair of the award advisory panel and
discoverer of many large primes, the prizes are spaced so that winning
each
successive award would require over 100 times more effort. "While one
could wait for computers to get 100 times faster, it would be much
smarter
to attract 100 times the number of people to cooperate on the problem,
or
to invent a more efficient prime searching procedure. Both methods
offer
benefits to society."
"Given current technology, I would estimate that GIMPS could discover
a
million digit prime within a year," said Simon Cooper, a member of the
award advisory panel. "Discovering a ten million digit prime may take
several more years." One of the easiest ways for people to join the
effort
is via the GIMPS project (see http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm).
A prize claim must provide the date and time of discovery, and fully
disclose all hardware and software used. Each claim must be verified
by an
independent party knowledgeable in the field of computation, and must
be
published in a refereed academic journal.
Complete information about the EFF Cooperative Computing Awards is
available at the http://www.eff.org/coop-awards web page.
--
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil
liberties
organizations devoted to preserving civil rights and promoting civil
responsibility on the Internet. We work to ensure that the Internet
remains a global vehicle for free speech, and that
the privacy and security of on-line communication is preserved.
Founded in
1990 as a nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San
Francisco, California. EFF maintains an extensive archive on civil
rights
and responsibilities, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org.
-- end --
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