Talk:Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

message: The "M" notation in this article differs from that in most other articles on Mersenne primes. Here, the largest currently known prime (as of mid-2007), 232582657-1, is referred to as M32582657. However, most of what I have read about this number also identifies it as M44, the 44th currently known Mersenne prime. 
If the definition at the beginning of the article Mersenne prime is followed, then the above number ought to be identified as either M32582657 or M(32582657) instead so as to avoid confusion with how Mersenne primes are identified; this should also apply to the other nine GIMPS-discovered primes so listed. Glenn L 07:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The notation should be changed here. PrimeHunter 16:19, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I also prefer the "M32582657" notation(though GIMPS itself has occasionally used the notation "M74207281"- e.g. in the 2016 press release). But then for consistency, the article mustn't use the Mn notation for the n-th Mersenne prime! Roentgenium111 (talk) 17:52, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  "M" notation 

message: It would be helpful to justify why one of the largest computer clusters in the world is used for something as seemingly useless as finding Mersenne prime numbers. Folding@home, SETI@home and projects similar to those work towards discovering very useful information, whereas GIMPS 
is to serve these seven purposes, as pasted from http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html:
1- Tradition - is tradition a good enough reason to waste the processing time of a virtual supercomputer?
2- For the by-products of the quest - understandable, yet those by-products that primes.utm.edu name dont seem worthy of a suprcomputer to me
3- People collect rare and beautiful items - see comment to 1
4- For the glory! - see comment to 1
5- To test the hardware - acceptable
6- To learn more about their distribution - what for?
7- For the money - yeah
I'm not attacking GIMPS, its just that the reasons presented don't convince me that there is no other more important use to which this processing cluster could be put to.DrSlony (talk) 00:31, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not the job of Wikipedia to justify things, although we can report with a neutral point of view what reliable sources have said about justification. Article talk pages are for discussing improvements to the article and not for general discussion of the subject of the article. If you want somebody to discuss GIMPS with then you can try http://mersenneforum.org/. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  RightDrSlony (talk) 13:34, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great Internet Waste of Time 

message: "The number M43112609 has 12,978,189 digits. To help visualize the size of this number, a standard word processor layout (50 lines per page, 75 digits per line) would require 3,461 pages to display it." Maybe it would be more helpful to state how many meters of Bibles or Harry Potter 7 books in a pile would be required for the number to be print in...
512upload (talk) 23:10, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's right. According to a rough calculation of mine, it is about 3 times as long as the seven Harry Potter books combined. (HP 5 has ~250,000 words, so maybe 1,000,000 letters; and I think the whole series is about 4 times as long as book 5 alone.)--Roentgenium111 (talk) 17:52, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Visualize 

message: See here,
 Tentative discovery of the 47th known Mersenne prime was reported by G. Woltman in e-mail messages sent June 4 and 7, 2009. The prime was apparently discovered in April, but was not noticed due to a configuration problem with the server that prevented a notification email being sent to the search organizers. Verification and official announcement of the value are expected shortly. Unoffocially, the number appears to be , which has  decimal digits, making it the 46th smallest known Mersenne prime and the second (not the first) largest. 
Keep our ears open.  Baccyak4H (Yak!) 19:44, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  new Mersenne prime soon? 

message: I was interested to find that the Mersenne primes were not found "in order". I guess I naively thought that GIMPS would start low, and work its way up to larger and larger numbers. Since that doesn't seem to be the case, perhaps some discussion of the search strategy would be warranted. How does GIMPS pick which numbers to test next, and how does it ensure it doesn't retest numbers which have already been ruled out? -- 128.104.112.114 (talk) 13:32, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: GIMPS allows its clients to "check out" possible primes, the way a library allows its patrons to check out books.  While the possible prime is checked out to a client, the client spends several weeks or even months working on each possible prime (depending on the speed of the client).  Just as with a library of books, GIMPS maintains a database showing which possible primes have been checked out to each client.  Also, a client can check out more than one number, making that number unavailable to other clients, and postponing the checking of that number until after the client has checked other numbers.  All this results in the possibility that many months can go by while an actual Mersenne prime sits in the queue of some client somewhere.  Meanwhile, a larger Mersenne prime might by chance be checked sooner or by a faster client.—GraemeMcRaetalk 13:50, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If there is no progress report for a really long time for a candidate assigned to a client then it will eventually be reassigned, but GIMPS is patient on that point. It can take years. Clients are usually assigned the smallest unassigned candidate unless they request otherwise. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:59, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coverage Method 

message: " … eleven of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery." Shouldn’t that be 12 since Jan. 2013? Perhaps this statement is altogether of little interest, PR, and might be omitted? – Fritz Jörn (talk) 05:26, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  11 or 12? 

message: IDK WikiEdit SOP, so I made a code comment. This paragraph isn't finished - it merely defines the awards associated with primes without defining how GIMPS taxes the winner, which is the whole reason I came to this article. Again, I have never been moved to do this so my apologies for peeing in your corner of the sandbox. PeasKraut Zef2Def   Comment made  in article  by 2601:98A:700:1F80:D416:CF76:213C:9E72 and moved to talk by Meters  07:35, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment moved from Software license section 

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thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion