Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Missouri Researchers Find Largest Prime Number

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> > So, for the more mathematically challenged of us, what is the benefit 
> > of this kind of research?
>
>
> I think that it is fair to say that the main benefit of this kind of 
> research is the intellectual challenge.  Rather like climbing Mount 
> Everest.

To say a little more - I haven't seen the details of what they did, but 
I would guess that a large part of this work is to apply already 
established techniques and throw more computer power at it.  But I could 
be completely wrong.

I did a similar (well much easier) computation a few years ago.  I 
computed the number of ways to place the five tetrominoes and 12 
pentominoes into an 8 by 10 rectangle, as described on this web page: 
http://www.xs4all.nl/~gp/PolyominoSolver/Polyomino.html.  The challenge 
wasn't in how to do it so much as where to get sufficient computer power 
- I estimated it would take one fast desktop computer about a year.  So 
I used the computers in the GCB math labs over a vacation, and ran them 
in parallel, and it took a few days to find that there were 
3,386,001,688 of them.

Most definitely just pure curiosity - nothing else.  And I learned a lot 
about TCP/IP programming in C.

Stephen

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