The GIMPS project may be in for some serious competition for America's CPU
time now, as ABC news did a story last night on the SETI project and the
impending release of software for Mac and Wintel systems. Which do you
suppose will sound more appealing to the average person--"the search for
enormous prime numbers" or "the search for alien life forms"--especially now
that SETI has such high-profile exposure? GIMPS has a big disadvantage in
that area.
Would anyone care to comment on the appeal of SETI? Personally speaking, it
doesn't interest me at all. I don't consider its goals to be terribly useful
or important, and I don't think that it has a reasonable chance of
accomplishing anything. But as number theory enthusiast I find something
intrinsically interesting and worthwhile about finding factors and searching
for Mersenne primes. I am probably in a minority of the general population
in this regard.
Let's just hope we don't lose too many existing GIMPS accounts.
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