It's estimated that it would take the world's fastest supercomputer 62,000 years to discover a prime number big enough to win the prize money. But if the task were shared by 1.5 million ordinary PCs across the Internet, it could be cracked in about a year, according to the calculations of Landon Curt Noll, a mathematician at Silicon Graphics who sits on the competition's advisory board. The competition is an effort to kick-start new ideas for distributed computing, where the problem is tackled cooperatively by hundreds of thousands of PCs across the Internet. It will only be solved cooperatively. The EFF Cooperative Computing Challenge, launched Wednesday, will award four separate cash prizes for the discovery of massive new prime numbers.
Primes are an essential component of strong cryptographic systems.
However, primes one million digits long are much too big for encryption purposes. The prize money was donated anonymously by someone who wanted to see technical challenges solved by cooperation rather than competition, said John Gilmore, the EFF's co-founder. He declined to name names. The competition follows the time-honored tradition of offering prizes for scientific breakthroughs, Gilmore said, and is a mixture of pure science and an attempt to push the state of the art for distributed computing. Problems that require many years of the world's fastest supercomputers to solve can often be broken down so that they can be solved by the contributions of hundreds of thousands of ordinary PCs.