[HN Gopher] Can humans say the largest prime number before we fi...
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Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next
one?
Author : robinhouston
Score : 269 points
Date : 2024-11-03 07:28 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (saytheprime.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (saytheprime.com)
| mserdarsanli wrote:
| They should say it in binary
| sigio wrote:
| It's a lot harder to make a mistake in binary mersenne primes,
| and if you loop your video's, 1 person should be able to do it
| quickly, so might be a bit boring.
| henearkr wrote:
| I you allow to replay the videos it's going to be boring
| anyway, in binary as well as in decimal.
|
| For example, in decimal, you can group the digits by pairs,
| and you just need 100 videos.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Or if you don't you just need ten videos
| yen223 wrote:
| Well at least the calculations are easier
|
| It takes about 3s to say 10 "one"s
|
| There are 136,279,841 ones in the binary mersenne prime
|
| That works out to about 41 million seconds worth of footage, or
| about 473 days
|
| Given there was a gap of 6 years between the discovery of this
| mersenne prime and the previous, in theory 1 person could say
| all the digits (in binary) before we find the next mersenne
| prime!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, if that one person can stay awake and not eat/drink and
| use the restroom, sure. Otherwise, you need to make this
| union happy with 8 hour shifts, 2 15 minute breaks, and a
| minimum of 12 hour turn around before next shift. If they
| work more than 8 hours in a day, they are entitled to over
| time. Working a sixth day in a row is automatic 1.5x pay, and
| seven consecutive days is automatic 2x pay.
|
| Want to run your calculations again? =)
| variaga wrote:
| "The largest known prime is two raised to the power of one
| hundred thirty six million two hundred seventy nine
| thousand eight hundred forty one, minus one" only took me
| 8.2 seconds to say aloud at a normal speaking pace. :)
| Gare wrote:
| > Given there was a gap of 6 years between the discovery of
| this mersenne prime and the previous
|
| It was the largest gap so far. Several primes were quite
| close. The next one might be discovered much sooner. Previos
| two had a gap of a bit less than a year.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Then sort the bits and RLE-code them ;-)
| repiret wrote:
| There's nothing to sort. In Binary, a Mersenne prime
| comprises only the digit 1.
| nojs wrote:
| Like this? https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g
| schoen wrote:
| With a lot fewer zeroes!
| ginko wrote:
| They could even reuse the footage for the next mersenne prime
| they find.
| joshdavham wrote:
| This looks like an awesome project! I wish you guys the best in
| your race against the machine.
| sushid wrote:
| Some unanswered questions: why in 419 digit chunks? Are there
| repeating chunks that they're going to dedupe?
| bromuro wrote:
| Also , how many videos can be added to a playlist in YouTube?
| +100k seem unlikely.
| netsharc wrote:
| They want each participant to upload their video on their own
| channel. It feels like the chances all 100k videos and
| accounts last even a week is vanishingly small...
| kylecazar wrote:
| Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence
| correctly?
|
| It would be a silly and pointless prank to derail the effort by
| omitting a number on purpose, but this is the internet... Or
| maybe it's just the 'coming together' aspect that we're going for
| anyway, in which case, it doesn't matter :)
| aaron695 wrote:
| > Are they going to verify that everyone said their sequence
| correctly?
|
| It's trivial-ish to do.
|
| First iteration - Google already auto-transcribes, just
| download the subtitles and compare to the required numbers.
|
| Someone else keen can check if that works -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDAGe7lsII
| LorenDB wrote:
| Maybe they could run it through Whisper on Groq? It should be
| able to process individual clips in about a second.
| kylecazar wrote:
| That's what I was thinking... Compare the assigned chunk text
| with the output from an LLM transcription.
| dudus wrote:
| Sure and we could also run these LLMs on Arduino s because
| why not?
| eurleif wrote:
| Except that:
|
| >We're aware it's likely that if you're reading out a long
| string of digits like this, you're likely to slip up or say a
| wrong digit. Mistakes are a very human feature, but as long
| as you correct it and carry on, they're fine - we just need
| evidence of humans having said the whole prime, not
| necessarily in one go. You can watch your video back through
| before submitting to check it's ok. If you want to edit
| together multiple clips to make your video, that's also fine!
|
| So they need the some degree of semantic understanding to
| recognize corrections, in the various forms they can take.
| Speech to text alone is insufficient.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| But errors would be rare enough that a single sufficiently
| OCD soul (or a handful if you wanted error correction of
| last verification step) could look over the transcripts and
| diff them against the text of the prime and ensure that
| every digit in the prime is part of a large sequence of
| digits read out by the people.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You don't need semantics. Just what is expected. If it
| deviates and returns to what is expected, it is a success.
| If it deviates and doesn't return, it is incorrect. The
| assertion is that all the digits are said, not that all the
| digits are said flawlessly.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| ...and accidentally discover the next biggest prime number!
| bromuro wrote:
| What about having a computer say them? How long would it take to
| have them recorded?
|
| The assignment here would be to find enough people to _listen_ to
| batches of 416 of them.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| Just to me, this seems like a waste of resources
| hooverd wrote:
| You gotta have some whimsy.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| So is bitcoin but everyone needs a hobby.
| whaaaaat wrote:
| It's art.
|
| Art is a valuable part of the human experience. Art connects
| us, inspires us, humors us.
|
| You may not appreciate all forms of art, and that's ok!
| Svoka wrote:
| Btw, is it possible to say such number at all? In English, I
| mean. How would that work?
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Probably not.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers only lists
| up to a Millinillion, or 10^3003. You can compound them, but it
| kinda defeats the point. A googol is too small, and a
| googolplex is too large.
| Arcorann wrote:
| If you check the section "Extensions of the standard
| dictionary numbers" on the page you linked, there's a system
| for naming arbitrarily large numbers as -illions. The prime
| here is approx. 8.82 * 10^41024319, and 10^41024319 is the
| 13674772nd -illion (short scale), so it would begin eight tre
| decilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliduoseptuagintaseptingent
| illion.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I think google just got fined that by Russia.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Feels like a good cause to get out the IIGS and boot up Kid Talk.
| ks2048 wrote:
| The homepage seems to be missing: 41 million digits at 2 digits
| per second ~= 237 days.
|
| It seems the 419 digits/person was chosen to lead to 100,000
| people.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Ooh, let's do this with the Busy Beaver function too. BB(5) is
| only 12,289 binary digits to say out loud. BB(6) and BB(7) can't
| possibly take that much longer to say.
| leononame wrote:
| For context, because I had to look it up: For BB(6), S(6) is
| known to be least 10 || 15 for in Knuth's up-arrow notation.
| You can read this as 10^(10 || 14) = 10^(10^(10 || 13)) and so
| on. It's much more than just a lot.
|
| Anyone know how many digits this is?
| dullcrisp wrote:
| 10 || 14
| wruza wrote:
| That's why it requires notation in the first place.
| aphantastic wrote:
| BB(5) is known to be 47,176,870, or 10110011111101110010100110
| in base 2.
|
| https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/BB(5)
| justplay wrote:
| does the current largest prime number have any practical
| implications as for today ?
| TZubiri wrote:
| Most cryptography is based on factoring difficulty
| schoen wrote:
| Not using primes anywhere near the range of the largest-known
| ones.
|
| The primes in your RSA keys are likely to be 1024-bit primes,
| or about 308 digits.
| hansvm wrote:
| Plus, the (known) large ones are all of a nice enough
| pattern that you could almost factor just by looking at the
| digit count of the product.
| schoen wrote:
| Or by finding them in one of the lists of largest known
| primes. :-)
| hansvm wrote:
| Yes, sorry, the implicit assumption I accidentally left
| in my head is that when we're talking about factoring
| being important, it's products of 2 biggish primes (hence
| an answer one step removed from the lists of largest
| known primes).
| graboy wrote:
| No.
| sklivvz1971 wrote:
| Yes: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/443706/why-it-is-
| im...
| largbae wrote:
| The key is to say it in a base-M136279841 number system.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| 1
| arjvik wrote:
| 10, actually
| peeters wrote:
| And how do you pronounce that?
| vimsee wrote:
| Ten
| baegi wrote:
| M136279841
| wslin wrote:
| Every base is base 10 ;)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/ev
| e...
| gcanyon wrote:
| I _love_ this! I can 't believe I've been a math person
| basically forever and this is the first time I've heard
| this.
| meowster wrote:
| old.* URL and without the ?rdt tracking, whatever that
| is:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/comments/1czson4/
| eve...
| utopcell wrote:
| So, each human gets 419 digits from a pool of ~41M digits, or a
| target of ~100k videos uploaded.
|
| This is the weirdest DDoS attack on YouTube I've seen.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Youtube has more than that uploaded every single day.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| YouTube has on average close to 4 million video uploads per
| day
| wruza wrote:
| And still can't recommend me anything interesting outside
| of my chamber.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if it didn't keep recommending me videos
| I've already watched (they're showing the red bar! they
| know I've watched it!) or from channels I've already said
| no to or on topics I've frequently said no to or on
| topics that I watched one video on[1] and now YouTube
| thinks I want a full page of similar videos.
|
| The algorithm is, for want of some better words, absolute
| cack.
|
| [1] Even if I don't finish the video or say I don't like
| it or say "don't recommend channel", FFHS
| wruza wrote:
| Lol, I know the pain (who doesn't). Disliking and
| removing from history works for me, at least in the short
| term. I put history right on the sidebar with unhook
| extension, I believe. Sometimes I clear whole pages from
| there to avoid spam.
|
| What to do with videos I don't want to dislike, idk. It
| keeps recommending watch-once-already-watched videos
| indefinitely.
| consf wrote:
| There's gotta be a "thank you, next" button!
| NikkiA wrote:
| I solve the problem by watching less and less on youtube.
| I think it's the solution they wanted.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I use the like buttons to show myself I've watched a
| video. It does not result in optimal video
| recommendations, but hey ho.
| encom wrote:
| The (dis)like buttons are now completely pointless on
| Youtube, since they removed dislikes when people disliked
| the wrong things and made Susan (RIP) sad.
|
| It feels like the Youtube algorithm is on drugs now. I
| get a lot of uninteresting recommendations of videos with
| no views from channels with no subscribers. A lot of
| recommendations of things I've already watched recently.
| A lot of recommendations of stuff that's extremely old (a
| lot of which I've already watched).
|
| And these recommendations persist for ages. Somehow it
| must know after a while, after presenting me the same
| video 50 times that I'm not going to watch it. It's so
| tiresome. And god help me if I watch a few cat videos. My
| recs are going to be full of cats for weeks. I feel like
| I have to watch cat videos in incognito.
| sneak wrote:
| The goal is maximum relevant ads shown per day, not
| maximum interesting videos discovered.
|
| You aren't the target market.
| mavhc wrote:
| 99% of my youtube viewing is via the subscriptions page
| withinboredom wrote:
| Just wait until your kid borrows your phone,one time, to
| go watch Minecraft videos. You will never escape.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > to go watch Minecraft videos
|
| Yep, I do that occasionally and bloody hell, you're not
| wrong about the flood.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Or your in-laws watch your Netflix over their holiday
| visit. Now I can't tell if Netflix has generally worse
| quality content these days or if it's just recommending
| garbage to me based on what people have watched on my
| profile.
| tux3 wrote:
| I think it's just pretty hard to recommend things outside
| of what they know you like.
|
| You can log off and look at what's popular on your
| country's front page. I get a couple popular music
| videos, clash of clans, soccer, and a whole lot of
| clickbait/prank/you won't believe this/pikachu face
| thumbnail videos.
| wruza wrote:
| Won't work without trying.
|
| It wasn't hard 10-15 years ago when it was at its peak. I
| suspect all it did was relaxing walk rules and simply
| presenting more diverse selection, which optimizes for
| surfing but deoptimizes for some modal group.
|
| I also remember right-bar surfing techniques that don't
| work anymore.
|
| Front page is distilled garbage to me.
| tux3 wrote:
| Part of it is also the creators optimizing for what the
| suggestion algorithm rewards. If you don't like the front
| page, you're looking for a needle in a haystack, because
| creators are rewarded very heavily for making the kind of
| content that lands on the front page and gets mass
| amounts of views.
|
| Youtube doesn't have much of an incentive to show things
| that are not either popular in general, or that already
| worked on you in the past. There are some people that
| care strongly about that (me included), but it's a very
| small minority.
|
| If the A/B test says distilled garbage is what hijacks
| the dopamine center the best, then you will be fed the
| A/B juice. And on average, people in your cohort will
| like it.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I seen multiple creators performing A/B tests on
| clickbait titles/thumbnails/pokatchu faces and everywhere
| conclusion was the same: it's so effective for their
| bottom line that even when they are not comfortable with
| it, they cannot afford to not do it.
| araes wrote:
| Above note is the reason Google can't recommend you
| anything.
|
| Consider momentarily the amount of data processing
| necessary to somehow recommend a relevant video from:
| ~14,000,000,000 videos on Youtube 615 seconds (~10
| minutes) mean length.
|
| Which works out to: 8,610,000,000,000
| seconds 143,500,000,000 minutes 2,391,666,666
| hours 3,274,083 months 272,840 years
| 27,284 decades 2,728 centuries 273 millennia
|
| Netflix simply attempting to provide somewhat relevant
| recommendations was a massive data crunching effort years
| ago, and even that was "only" the official movies and
| television of humanity. Data take from a previous post I
| made 9 months ago [1] and from this article [2] and this
| paper on Youtube data statistics [3].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39421041
|
| [2] "What We Discovered on 'Deep YouTube'", https://www.t
| heatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-m...
|
| [3] "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube",
| https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066/3766
| mustyoshi wrote:
| It can't be that hard, once you develop a profile for a
| user, you just need to classify the incoming videos and
| cross reference their profile against the
| classifications.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I think that "just" might be doing some heavy lifting in
| that assertion.
| sulam wrote:
| Sure and classifying video is one of the classically hard
| things for computers to do. Really classifying in
| general.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Turn off watch history in your google settings. Then
| remove all your favorites. (save them to a playlist first
| to keep them) This forces the algorithm to only consider
| what other people who have watched the video you have
| open are watching when building suggestions, and this
| makes the suggestions dramatically better.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Youtube is one symptom that Google's business model is
| ethically and ecologically unsustainable. Process and store
| whatever nonsense to collect more user data.
| fmbb wrote:
| Are there any recent stats on how many hours (maybe days
| now) that are uploaded per second?
| delecti wrote:
| I'm seeing a variety of places all saying 500 hours per
| minute, or 30,000x as much upload as clock time.
| consf wrote:
| Imagine trying to watch even a fraction of that!
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| DDoSing youtube i am afraid ll take far far more than that.
| atleast a 100 million AI generated garbage videos to be
| uploaded every hour to even consider it as an attack at the
| minimum
| cfiggers wrote:
| Big assumption there
| unsigner wrote:
| Nice try, AI trainers.
| lordelph wrote:
| I got strong "The Nine Billion Names of God" vibes from this!
|
| Just as the last video is uploaded, without any fuss, the stars
| start going out...
|
| https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
| fleabitdev wrote:
| I last read that story nearly a decade ago, I think. This time
| around, it feels more real. The engineers follow silly
| instructions from people with money, and then...
| wslh wrote:
| This is not how I read the story... the people you are
| referring are monks in Tibet much more than "people with
| money".
| sulam wrote:
| The monks were just gig workers.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| That was a fun read. I think I let myself get a little too
| excited for an ending that couldn't possibly satisfy, but it
| was still satisfying innit its own way
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| "Innit its" lol sorry for the weird typo
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I read this as a teenager. So good.
| rtkwe wrote:
| A similar kind of story though much longer is Unsong by Scott
| Alexander. The prolog starts with Apollo 8 crashing into the
| celestial sphere and divine magic starts leaking back into the
| world; Angels are real, Kabala based on the names of God allow
| real magic and they've been copyrighted. Our protagonist is a
| worker bee that spends all day saying nonsense combinations
| that could be True Names for his employer to patent and sell.
| One day right after the end of his shift he stumbles on one
| completely by accident and it changes everything.
|
| https://unsongbook.com/
| fuglede_ wrote:
| At https://youtube.com/watch?v=5GFW-eEWXlc&t=1480s, the
| characters in the 1977 epic space opera Star Wars state the first
| 48 (binary) digits of the prime, 47 years before its discovery!
| thih9 wrote:
| > None of us can do it alone
|
| Off topic but this is not technically true. 41 million digits
| means 1.3 years of saying one digit per second. Even taking 3x as
| long, to account for sleep and other activities, this would take
| about four years - still very much doable.
|
| Four years times $100k/year plus $100k completion bonus equals
| $500k; I guess many people would be willing to do it alone under
| these conditions.
| whaaaaat wrote:
| Do we find prime numbers slower than one every four years? I
| would have thought we find newer bigger ones more quickly than
| that.
|
| The goal of this project is not only to say the big number, but
| to say the big number before we discover the next bigger
| number.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| It took 6 years between the last largest prime number and the
| most recent.
|
| The two gaps before that were each only 1 year though.
|
| So depends on how lucky you think you'll get.
| tyjkot wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but what is the purpose of finding prime
| numbers that are insanely large?
| envp wrote:
| Beyond a points its curiosity and pushing existing
| computational techniques to their limits. Sometimes it leads to
| new discoveries in computational techniques or in rarer cases
| new theoretical work.
|
| Long story short, it's fun to find out new things about weird
| numbers :)
| tyjkot wrote:
| Thank you for educating me on this.
| jebarker wrote:
| Because they're there
| jws wrote:
| Don't be boring. A quick triage with an AI and a spot check
| suggest that the guitar solo at the end of _Hotel California_ has
| just about the right number of notes (depending on how many '7'
| you get).
|
| _Sweet Child of Mine_ probably works.
|
| _Comfortably Numb(ber)_ allegedly works, but I doubt any of the
| singers I have access to can enunciate fast enough. For the most
| relaxed of the options, it has amazing little clouds of fast
| notes.
|
| MUST RESIST: this is worse than waking up to a Saturday morning
| "Nerd Sniping", I could lose the whole weekend to this... I'll
| bet Nate isn't busy... With him and the girls from (redacted)
| _Bohemian Rhapsody_ could work...
|
| UPDATE: There goes the weekend. So far I've been in a fight with
| ChatGPT about counting syllables in copyrighted lyrics where I
| ended up suggesting it get help for its obvious emotional trauma
| at the hands of an IP lawyer and lined up 5 singers. "enjoy the
| ride" has beaten "they are just intrusive thoughts".
| lupire wrote:
| Related prior art:
|
| "She's My Number Pi: The Irrationally Long Number Pi Song"
|
| https://youtu.be/Skf8NTEnrO4?si=gWDlZwNi67Zc7nLM
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| "Constrained writing" is literally the thing these LLM's are
| good at.
|
| The Great Gatsby is pitiful in comparison to the output any
| prompt anyone reading this can obtain within seconds.
|
| Not to diminish, it is fun as fuck, but accumulating uncannily
| daily.
| metalman wrote:
| given some sort of excrmption from time the chance of any human
| or group of humans getting it right are still zero, nobody is
| that good, so the only plausable way to do it, is to just
| aproximate the number, which we then might as well get on with
| congradulating ourselves with a job well done, me first I so
| great,now you ,and you ,and well everybody so great now
| carabiner wrote:
| I can, but I'm built different.
| creativenolo wrote:
| This is wonderful.
|
| But then I read it, and they call it stupid. And then I think,
| oh... I think I will move on. How boring am I. And why put it up
| on YouTube - so many videos - given you can't legitimately
| download all the videos (unless I am mistaken?) I mean you are
| investing so much of other people time with this, you think you
| might offer up an alternative own system in return... how boring
| I am.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| How fun. I went ahead and automated this by recording numbers 0-9
| into mp3 files and then reading each prime number individually to
| play the mp3 of the corresponding number. Feel free to reuse if
| you want to participate.
|
| https://gist.github.com/magicmicah/a8cf863ed656e5b56c5449656...
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| I understand the nerdy need to automate this, but I feel like
| this defeats the purpose of the while experiment.
| yuvadam wrote:
| I don't know, it seems like a nice creative take, and it is
| their voice (as opposed to text-to-speech) so it does fit the
| requirements
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| And that's fair, it's certainly more monotone and less human
| but knowing me, I would make ten mistakes before I finally
| got to a good cut.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This title _really_ needs "Mersenne" in it, because for just
| "primes" the answer is trivially "no".
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(page generated 2024-11-09 23:00 UTC)