30 points | by andyhedges 4 days ago ago
6 comments
> If you ran SETI@home or Folding@home back when that was a thing
SETI@home is gone but Folding@home is still very much a thing. There are currently 133 active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary
Could you make the tracking a little bit better for the website? I turned off my machine but it is still saying "Active" and the compute time keeps increasing on the website.
Just curious - is there any practical significance/use of such large primes, other than publishing?
The largest known prime could be considered a universal scientific benchmark.
It is also a concise statement that is trivial to verify.
(by "trivial" meaning much much easier to verify than to discover in the first place)
Very large primes are not a particularly useful result.
The mathematical tools which people develop along the way to finding them can be useful for other number theory problems.
seems fun. like boinc. i wish there was more boinc.
> If you ran SETI@home or Folding@home back when that was a thing
SETI@home is gone but Folding@home is still very much a thing. There are currently 133 active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary
Could you make the tracking a little bit better for the website? I turned off my machine but it is still saying "Active" and the compute time keeps increasing on the website.
Just curious - is there any practical significance/use of such large primes, other than publishing?
The largest known prime could be considered a universal scientific benchmark.
It is also a concise statement that is trivial to verify.
(by "trivial" meaning much much easier to verify than to discover in the first place)
Very large primes are not a particularly useful result.
The mathematical tools which people develop along the way to finding them can be useful for other number theory problems.
seems fun. like boinc. i wish there was more boinc.