Martin has probably not come to the most unbiased place for an answer to his question, as I would expect most people here to believe that GIMPS is indeed significant. I don't know of any other mathematical search doing as much reliable work.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] used to be popular, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while. It had many more participants, probably because looking for extra-terrestrial life is sexier than looking for massive prime numbers. However, I understand that their search lost popularity when the server ran out of source data so kept on recycling already checked data. Google apparently offers something similar, related to protein folding as a possible way to assist cancer research. I don't know how much CPU power they have at their disposal. I believe Amazon are also either looking at or have already implemented a similar project for their users. GIMPS currently harnesses power equivalent to over 1000 CRAY supercomputers, which seems to me significant. See http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml for details. The search has already found the ten largest Mersenne primes known, which is already mathematically significant. See http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html#known for details. No Mersenne Prime has been discovered by any other person or group since 1996. Also, millions of candidates have been eliminated by being shown to be composite, 118 of them by me. Certainly GIMPS is significant, but I cannot comment on how it compares with the others. It would be churlish to say that we have had a result ten times but SETI haven't had any... Ian On 04/12/2007, Chris Caldwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What is the question: > > Significant as in most important? Or largest? Or most like to produce a > mathematically significant result? Or... > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Martin > > Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 12:02 PM > > To: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list > > Subject: [Prime] MPrime significance > > > > Of the various mathematical numbers searches underway, > > > > how significant is the GIMPS amongst the various other searches? > > > > > > Regards, > > Martin > > _______________________________________________ > > Prime mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime > > > _______________________________________________ > Prime mailing list > [email protected] > http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime > -- Ian W Halliday, BA Hons, SA Fin, MIMIS, ATMG, CL +44 772 546 2965 (GMT) _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
