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Our PC has been crunching numbers happily
ever since we joined the
GIMPS. The good folks at the GIMPS assigned us the number 43,172,509.
Our job: to find out whether 2 ^ 43,172,509 - 1
is a prime number. If it turns out to be prime, it'll be one of the largest
ever discovered, and the 45th Mersenne Prime. (GIMPS stands for
the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.)
We only have the one PC and it's a
pretty slow one, so it's going to take it quite a while to find out.
It's been working on the problem around the clock for days
now, running the free program we downloaded from the GIMPS. Fortunately,
the program doesn't tie up our PC at all, but runs at low priority in
the background. It should be finished checking pretty soon now, so
watch this space to see if it turns out to be the 45th Mersenne prime
number.
Here are some other exponents they
assigned us to check:
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1,758,689
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1,758,737
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1,758,761
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1,758,793
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1,822,837
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6,322,639
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2,542,147
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2,542,151
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2,542,187
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2,542,201
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2,542,237
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2,542,327
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2,553,427
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2,553,497
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2,553,511
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2,553,527
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2,643,661
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2,727,299
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7,677,569
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2,842,813
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4,200,397
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4,506,289
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4,058,357
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4,067,509
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3,020,587
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4,928,863
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4,773,331
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10,264,081
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9,778,019
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10,564,423
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10,848,137
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11,118,307
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11,386,819
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11,680,679
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11,982,661
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11,633,827
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11,626,117
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12,773,867
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11,338,121
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8,057,183
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13,311,413
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12,739,871
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14,215,897
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14,847,509
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14,479,187
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14,639,047
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15,070,801
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15,600,329
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15,488,777
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15,698,149
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17,523,199
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9,230,483
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18,855,559
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9,827,383
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20,285,869
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10,547,587
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18,288,929
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33,825,367
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26,985,419
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15,181,823
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15,591,019
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31,234,339
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31,863,427
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38,203,133
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33,178,633
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40,456,289
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20,483,377
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41,940,103
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20,660,747
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38,825,077
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20,829,317
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42,072,731
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20,264,287
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41,854,567
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Alas, all of these turned out to be composite numbers.
So if your PC has too much free
time, why not join the GIMPS, and give it something useful to do? (Okay.
Not actually useful, but, well... curious). It's not difficult -- everything
is set up automatically. All you need is a PC and an electrical outlet
to become a part of this huge distributed computer.
The GIMPS is also a competition. To see what
some people with too much free time are up to, check out the Mersenne Forum.
slovenská verzia
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