It's a distributed project, so some computers finish faster than others. But more particularly, primes are not verified as being the n-th Mersenne prime until at least two computers have checked every exponent below that range to verify that (1) it has a known factor, (2) it is prime, or (3) it is composite. In the (likely) last case, the double check is not considered complete unless the residues match (to guard against machine errors). Charles Greathouse Analyst/Programmer Case Western Reserve University On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 2:08 PM, W. Edwin Clark <wclark@mail.usf.edu> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 3:24 AM, Guy Haworth <g.haworth@reading.ac.uk> wrote:
The record M(57,885,161), discovered by Prof. Cooper et al, is a prime with 17,425,170 decimal digits. It is the 48th known prime M(p).
It may yet not be the 48th in size: GIMPS have only just confirmed the '42nd by size' position of the prime M(p) discovered in 2005. http://www.mersenne.org/report_milestones/
What are the reasons that the prime M(57,885,161) was discovered before verifying what the `43rd by size` is? Is it just that nobody wants to find a prime smaller than the largest known prime? _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun