INSTEAD of idling away running a screensaver, your PC could be winning you a
cash prize. Last week, one of a group of mathematics enthusiasts who devote
their spare computing power to the search for huge prime numbers made a
discovery that should bag a $50 000 prize.
Members of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), who use their
PCs in a 鈥渄istributed computing鈥� effort to search for prime numbers of the form
2p鈭�1, where p is itself a prime, now claim to have found the 38th of these
Mersenne primes, a number with some 2 million digits that is the largest prime
ever discovered. 鈥淚t has got to be verified independently,鈥� says George Woltman,
a retired computer programmer in Orlando, Florida, who wrote the GIMPS
software.
If confirmed, the user of the computer that made the discovery will receive
$50 000 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) of San Francisco.
The prize, a bounty on the first million-digit prime, was offered to promote
distributed computing projects. 鈥淲e wanted to see what effect prizes in the
order of a year鈥檚 salary would have,鈥� says the foundation鈥檚 John Gilmore. 鈥淚t鈥檚
a kind of experiment.鈥� If prizes encourage more people to join distributed
computing efforts, says Gilmore, research institutes could use them to buy cheap
computing power. The EFF is offering even larger prizes for the finders of the
first 10-million, 100-million and billion-digit primes.
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Even without prizes, distributed computing has caught the public imagination.
Already, half a million people are donating computer time to look for alien
broadcasts as part of the SETI@home project, which was only launched last month
(This Week, 15 May, p 23). So popular is the project that network managers at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor have been forced to post messages
explaining that the 鈥渓ogin servers鈥� used by students don鈥檛 have any spare
capacity to run SETI@home.