On Wednesday 27 March 2002 17:41, you wrote: > Whilst I was surfing I came across the word "Mersenne", > even though I didn't search for it. > After I had finished laughing, I had to tell you people. > > The Hack Furby Challenge is a $250 prize offered by > Peter van der Linden http://www.afu.com/fur.html for > software to do something with a Furby. The original > Hack Furby Challenge was won by Jeffrey Gibbons who > supplied a Furby Upgrade Kit hardware, the new prize is > for software. > > Peter van der Linden suggests "You can program Furby to solve > mathematical puzzles and equations, to look for Mersenne prime > numbers, or simply to act as a speaking clock." > > The $74 upgrade, > http://www.appspec.net/products/UpgradeKits/FurbyUpgrade/root.html > replaces the original 6502 CPU with a 20MHz 8051 with 1MByte > of serial Flash RAM and 1152 bytes of normally accessible RAM. > > Clearly this is not enough to Lucas-Lehmer test big Mersennes,
Ah, but don't the little monsters interact with each other? A large network of Furbys organised as a Beowulf cluster just possibly could be powerful enough to do something useful (apart from filling holes in landfill sites). In any case, even a single Furby could probably be programmed to factorise M(4), which seems to be the definitive challenge for quantum computers at present ;-) Regards Brian Beesley _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
