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To be fair, both have no direct practical applications. And getting people interested in math is actually a great side-effect of stunts like this.

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The direct application of looking for primes is that's an interesting computer science research project (perf, networking, big data) with a clear practical use, besides obviously being a pure research field which is valuable in itself. There are 800+ results in google scholar for the project (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=GIMPS&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&...)

Vocalizing primes? Maybe it could be used in speech synthesis although I'm not sure that the terms allow it or that the participants would be happy with their voice becoming AI...

Writing an emulator for the Z80 also has no practical uses but we all do things for fun don't we?

I am glad you like it. I never claimed my personal projects are anything more than that. They have uses for me for sure :-)

But then, you know, I don't involve 100k people in my projects...

> with a clear practical use,

What is a practical use for largest known prime number?

The practical use is what we get from learning how to calculate it (fine tuning the algorithms, finding new ones, etc.)

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