Could someone tell me as a layperson, how finding these numbers is helping humanity?
Mathematics in general is a bunch of stuff that often looks useless to laypeople or even professionals and may look so for 200 years until it very suddenly becomes relevant and crucial.
The computer that you used to post your comment uses a lot of mathematical stuff developed in previous centuries. It is unlikely that Gauss or Euler could have predicted that their work (ink on paper) will one day be used to facilitate completely different modes of communication.
And it is well possible that some priest criticized them for wasting their talents on abstract things that don't help humanity as of 1800.
It’s not known if there is an infinite number of Mersenne primes (though it is strongly suspected) - so an interesting mathematical object to discover would be ‘the largest Mersenne prime’ - but this process isn’t going to find that (it might find a candidate but it won’t find a proof). If there are indeed infinite Mersennes then this search is just guaranteed to keep finding more forever.
It’s like looking for green pebbles on a beach. It’s nice when you find one to add to your collection, but it’s not that surprising, and if you keep looking you’ll probably find more. You’re not advancing geological knowledge if you keep looking and finding more.
It’s like saying, we have a project that keeps sorting larger and larger sets using quicksort because we believe it will help advance the state of sorting algorithms. ‘We just sorted the largest ever set!’
Say these are really relevant 200 years down the line, maybe even 100 or 50, does it really make sense to calculate them now, given that computers 50, 100 and 200 years from now will outperform ours by orders of magnitude?
Looking at this as reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronology
Say you grab a CPU from the end of the 70s and get it working until now, that'd be about 13*10e15 operations, or about a month of processing in a modern 5GHz CPU. That's 40 years to a month.
IDK about this particular scientific team, but if you have to run a long-running task, you will be a lot more careful about complexity and speed of your data and algorithms instead of relying on brute force. Maybe you will actually discover some real improvements of existing knowledge.
I can even see the effect throughout my IT life outside science. People who cut their teeth on processors with limited power and not enough RAM tend to produce much more efficient solutions even when programming modern computers. They just don't take the gigabytes and gigahertz for granted.
The Mersenne primes for example are a delightful little mathematical object. IMO they are immediately curious and interesting. I am very grateful that we continue to make progress in understanding them.
We often don't know what the applications are at the time, but that pure mathematics work very often forms the foundation of something important later on.
When people give such an argument, they usually mean "I am not interested in this topic" and use "why is this helping humanity" as an excuse for their ignorance.
"When people say that other people usually mean X when they ask something, they are just ascribing that motive to another person, even if it is not what the asker has meant."
GIMPS' ~1PetaFLOPS[1] uses no more than a megawatt [2].
That's about 10 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) over a year [3].
The average US house uses about 10 MWh in a year [4] so GIMPS = the electrical power use of ~1,000 households. Portland reduced their power consumption by 20 GWh by switching their street lights to LEDs[5].
The electrical consumption for Superbowl parties is an estimated 75 GWh [6]. (I think Superbowl parties are far more frivolous.)
[1] - https://www.mersenne.org/primenet/
[2] from 2012, "HP plans to deliver a full peak petaflop with just a single megawatt" - https://www.hpcwire.com/2012/09/05/hp_intel_score_petaflop_s...
[3] 365.25days * 24hours/day * 1MW / 1000 = 8.8 GWh
[4] "In 2020, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,715 kilowatthours (kWh)" https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
[5] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/678781
[6] https://www.americasgenerators.com/blog/post/2017/02/15/What...
A few years ago, I got a PhD in pure mathematics (low dimensional geometry and topology). As someone who loves pure math and spent many years devoted to it, I've had many conversations with mathematicians about whether we should be concerned with practical applications. One common argument, which several people have made here, is that there's been a lot of math that found practical application long after it was done. That really only applies to a very small proportion of math. The vast majority of math done has still never found application. So arguing that we should do that math because it may have applications later is kind of like arguing you should play the lottery since there's a greater than 0 chance that you'll win. Also, from the (admittedly biased) group of mathematicians I've spoken to about this, very few seemed to actually do math in the hope that it would be useful later.
Instead, people do math because it's interesting, beautiful, and challenging. I would argue this Mersenne Prime search is almost more like recreation. I could be wrong, since I never did much number theory, but I don't think this is advancing any research. It's just a fun hobby for people who enjoy math. I think doing math for the sake of its beauty is generally fine. I do have concerns about the climate aspect of this particular project though. This is a lot of power being consumed just for recreation. This project may not be big enough to have much of an environmental impact, but in general, I think we should be more mindful of not wasting large amounts of computing power just for fun.
How do _you_ help humanity by browsing and posting? Like, what a weird thing to ask. I assume you ask the same thing of everything, right?