>Perhaps a gigadigit prime, but I think 10,000,000 should certainly be within
>the limits.
I was thinking about it informally the other day, and I thought that I expected to see 10,000,000-digit primes and 100,000,000-digit primes in my lifetime, but probably not 1,000,000,000-digit primes. Then I looked at the historical info about the largest known prime
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/notes/by_year.html and a billion-digit prime has a decent chance of being discovered in my lifetime. The prediction of 2009, however, seems much overly optimistic to me.
>exagurus out there find a much better solution. For now, it _seems_ like
>we get 3010 extra digits (possibly +1) for each 10000th iteration (of *2), but
>that is of course pure guesswork.
It is a fact that each additional bit adds log10(2) digits = 0.30103.
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| Jud "program first and think later" McCranie |
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