From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2000 - 11:17:30 MST
Michael M. Butler wrote:
> Gee Whillikers, Spike, you use kitchen arithmetic better'n... well, I
> can't say that, on account of the little'uns....
Wow thanks, Mike. With that introduction, I will mention that
we do in fact have an extropians GIMPS team, sort of. Recall
from a few months ago that GIMPS is an organized effort to
search for enormous prime numbers, and Mersenne primes are a
special class of primes, of the form 2^n-1, such that they have
a shortcut to determining their primeness. This shortcut allows
the determination of primeness to be dozens of orders of magnitude
faster than ordinary factoring. [Now theres a phrase one seldom
hears: dozens of orders of magnitude.]
My underlying motive for working this [other than being a math
freak] is encouraging organized parallel processing, which in
some fuzzy way which I dont understand may somehow work
towards a singularity. spike
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