Saturday 6 January 2018

The recently discovered largest prime numbers continues the pattern nicely...

With thanks to James Higham whose post alerted me to this.

I explained that there appears to be a surprisingly consistent pattern if you plot the number of digits against date discovered back in 2016.

Here's the updated chart:



UPDATE: It turns out I needn't have bothered doing my own spreadsheet, the relevant Wiki article includes a much longer term chart showing exactly the same phenomenon: "The red line is the exponential curve of best fit: y = exp(0.187394 t - 360.527), where t is in years."

6 comments:

Dinero said...

As the time between them is quite regular 2 or 3 years , it seems the computing power being put to the calculations is increasing.

paulc156 said...

D. Moore's Law in action. Wiki has a similar log chart for number of transistors on a chip v dates on the horizontal axis.

Dinero said...

And so that is an increase in computing power, an inherent logarithmic product on X axis plotted with factor increasing logarithmic on Y axis gives a straight line when plotted logarithmic on the Y.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Din, yes, time between finds is reasonably even as well.

PC, I think Moore's law has something to do with it.

MikeW said...

Din,Paul,MW,

I imagine a short story, inflated into a long film, set sometime in the near future where the unemployment and deflation figures, despite GUV and Neo-Libs best attempts to distort them to their normal status (fucking useless), start to follow a strange, deterministic sequence that 'is not yet fully understood' by leading IMF economists. Some unknown,but brilliant scientist in a proper maths department,in snowy Finland, seems to be behind the underlying data and debunking.

After the usual Hollywood runaround, the American heros finally get into the hidden office - there is no researcher on the university payroll. There is just a forgotton computer with a cheap Acer screen.

The female lead, playing a brilliant engineer, doesn't get it. In the end, after lots of tedious 'Hal' like discussions with the AI, the good looking male adjunct to the famous female star gets it. 'My God' he says, 'Its Moores's Law! The machines have finally done it.'Being the Linguist in the group, who didn't seem to have much to do at the beginning of the film, he continues with authority; 'Of course, it's basic communications: the machines were trying to tell us not the future - Da Da Dar - but what has already come to pass.' The lead types onto the keyboard, 'Is this true?'

The screen cuts to that bit in the Matrix where the cat walks pass the building. The End.

Mark Wadsworth said...

MW, nice, but I'm a bit lost now. Never watched the matrix.