Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?

[lordelph]

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...

[rtkwe]

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/

[fleabitdev]

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...

[Forgeties79]

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

[robertlagrant]

I read this as a teenager. So good.

[utopcell]

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]

Youtube has more than that uploaded every single day.

[vivzkestrel]

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

[stogot]

Can’t you just AI the production of each of these?

[largbae]

The key is to say it in a base-M136279841 number system.

[alwayslikethis]

1

[kylecazar]

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 :)

[LorenDB]

Maybe they could run it through Whisper on Groq? It should be able to process individual clips in about a second.

[addandsubtract]

...and accidentally discover the next biggest prime number!

[aaron695]

> 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

[Xcelerate]

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.

[aphantastic]

BB(5) is known to be 47,176,870, or 10110011111101110010100110 in base 2.

https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/BB(5)

[leononame]

For context, because I had to look it up: For BB(6), Σ(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?

[ks2048]

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.

[jws]

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".

[Jerrrrrrry]

"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.

[lupire]

Related prior art:

"She's My Number Pi: The Irrationally Long Number Pi Song"

https://youtu.be/Skf8NTEnrO4?si=gWDlZwNi67Zc7nLM

[joshdavham]

This looks like an awesome project! I wish you guys the best in your race against the machine.

[mserdarsanli]

They should say it in binary

[sigio]

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.

[yen223]

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!

[nojs]

Like this? https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g

[ginko]

They could even reuse the footage for the next mersenne prime they find.

[marginalia_nu]

Then sort the bits and RLE-code them ;-)

[analog31]

if it's a Mersenne prime, then it could just be 0xFFFFFFFFF...

[magicmicah85]

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]

I understand the nerdy need to automate this, but I feel like this defeats the purpose of the while experiment.

[bromuro]

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.

[thih9]

> 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]

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.

[creativenolo]

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.

[sushid]

Some unanswered questions: why in 419 digit chunks? Are there repeating chunks that they're going to dedupe?

[bromuro]

Also , how many videos can be added to a playlist in YouTube? +100k seem unlikely.

[Svoka]

Btw, is it possible to say such number at all? In English, I mean. How would that work?

[cryptica]

When I see stuff like this, I don't understand how the economics work out for YouTube. So many pointless videos uploaded for free. How can they possibly make a profit?

[Waterluvian]

Feels like a good cause to get out the IIGS and boot up Kid Talk.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Instead of base 10, you use base largest known prime, then this is pretty easy to do: 1

[TheRealPomax]

This title really needs "Mersenne" in it, because for just "primes" the answer is trivially "no".

[Dylan16807]

They're not talking about the next time we find a prime, but they're also not talking about the next time we find a Mersenne prime.

They're talking about the next time we find a largest known prime. Mersenne or not. So while the title could be clearer, adding the word "Mersenne" would imply the wrong thing.

While it's true that the next record will probably be Mersenne, the next Mersenne might not be a record.

[qwe----3]

Just to me, this seems like a waste of resources

[whaaaaat]

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!

[hooverd]

You gotta have some whimsy.

[bobsmooth]

So is bitcoin but everyone needs a hobby.