>From: "Halliday, Ian" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: Aaron Blosser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>CC: "Mersenne@Base. Com" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: Mersenne: GIMPS in Science News
>Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 20:29:22 +1200
>
>This brings to mind a question I have been considering for a while: Why
>should it be that the seti@home project has collected such a large
>number of downloads while gimps has only around 10,000.
>Is it that the search for prime numbers is perceived to be the domain of
>geeks while everybody is supposed to be excited about extra-terrestrial
>life?
There are 38 Mersenne primes known, and almost certainly more unknown. We
haven't found a single extraterrestrial life form. I would think that that
alone would give some evidence of the chances involved. For that matter,
every machine working on GIMPS contributes to the effort, whereas most SETI
work is duplicated unnecessarily. I can name five Mersenne primes in
decimal form offhand: 3, 7, 31, 127, 8191. I would like to challenge any
SETI supporter to name even one lifeform that they (or any previous effort -
all the ones I named were previous efforts) have found. I hope this doesn't
start /another/ onlist flamewar... (sigh)
>Or is it because of the underlying perception that mathematics is hard
>and boring?
>I've invited some of my real-life friends and colleagues to join gimps,
>but without success.
I wonder if telling them about the possibility of finding hardware errors
would help. If we can each get all our friends to run one 5-30 day
double-check each, it'll make a huge difference.
Some of these people had downloaded the seti client
>and run it for a while but didn't seem to be impressed by its
>performance or results.
>I'm much more excited about gimps, and believe that I am much more
>likely to find a certain Mersenne prime than evidence about
>extra-terrestrial life (which would still only be a speculation even
>so).
>
>Humour me and visit http://www.geocities.com/intellectualsuicide/
>
>Regards,
>
>Ian
Regards,
Nathan
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