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New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)

(www.mersenne.org)
359 points sdsykes | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 11:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.194s | source
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dataflow ◴[19 Oct 24 05:04 UTC] No.41885759[source]▶
Given this contest can presumably go on infinitely long, what is the ultimate point of the contest? Is there some kind of theoretical or practical benefit to discovering a new Mersenne prime?
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ISL ◴[19 Oct 24 05:12 UTC] No.41885783[source]▶
To learn something about primes.

Perhaps there is a pattern or a way to more-accurately predict which numbers will be prime.

Also, it is cool.

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mort96 ◴[19 Oct 24 10:44 UTC] No.41887032[source]▶
Do we expect to learn something interesting from any given new Mersenne prime discovered? Don't we kinda have enough so that if we are going to discover something interesting by analyzing them, we can do that with the ones we already know about?
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1. lagadu ◴[19 Oct 24 11:02 UTC] No.41887122[source]▶
I'm not an SME but I would imagine that if there's some sort of very large scale pattern in Mersenne primes then finding that might lead to the discovery of some currently unknown emergent property. Of course this argument is likely unfalsifiable, as it can scale infinitely if there's an infinite amount of them, though we don't even know whether they are a finite set or not.