Fun_People Archive
2 Dec
A new Mersenne Prime: Primetime for Pentiums

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon,  2 Dec 96 22:30:14 -0800
To: Fun_People
Subject: A new Mersenne Prime: Primetime for Pentiums

Excerpted-from: TBTF for 12/2/96: Primetime for Pentiums

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  _|   __/  _|  _|      .adWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWbn.
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    Tasty Bits          "~^Y"   /    ..dMWMP".ammmmdMMMUP^~"
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||| Primetime for Pentiums |||

It was news in 1994 [33] when the Cypherpunks broke the 429-bit key of a
challenge message ("the words are squeamish ossifrage"), working over a
period of 8 months with 1500 Unix workstations distributed around the
Internet. Now it's the Pentiums' turn [34]. George Woltman, a programmer in
Florida, wrote code for Intel machines to find Mersenne primes and en-
couraged people around the world to run it. Last month a programmer in
Paris, Joel Armengaud <joe@apsydev.com>, announced that one of 18 Pentiums
he had set to searching had found the 35th Mersenne prime: 2 to the power
1,398,269 minus 1. (The 34th Mersenne prime had been found earlier this year
using a Cray supercomputer.) Thanks to Dan Kohn <dan@teledesic.com> (as
usual) for the heads-up on this story.

[33] <http://www.netsurf.com/nsf/v01/03/nsf.01.03.html#sc2>
[34] <http://cgi.sjmercury.com/business/compute/prime1122.htm>

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