Hi
Egaladeist, I understand your point of view, but there is more to it.Quote:
My question would be...why waste the resources of 700 computers over a period of
years that could be put to better use folding DNA , or other medical or practical
applications, rather than trying to find a prime number that has no practical
application at all.
In this particular example, a huge prime number[1] has been found (this is not even
interesting to me :D ). But a question remains: How has it been found? What
were the developments made? They invented and/or improved existing algorithms[2]
([enter your favorite one]) - are their ideas generaliseable to other, more
"relevant" fields?
While a few projects, like protein folding[3] (contribute!) can be easily
distributed (like in the above search for the largest prime number), others can't.
The latter may require shared-memory or fast-network equipment. Improvements
in other fields (like number theory) may provide the necessary information to
reduce those requirements, effectively allowing the independent study
of such things (Independent in the meaning, that smaller companies/universities
can afford to buy the computational needs).
Example: IBM's new machine: blue gene[4]. It has been developed in collaboration
with "lattice physicists" (the QCDOC project) and provides a substantial, and well-priced
contribution in biology/medical research. Interestingly, those physicists wanted (and still
want) to calculate physical processes during the expansion of the universe or in particle
colliders (RHIC, CERN). Those physicists were only able to do so, because a Mathematician
Grassmann[5] developed a strange Algebra, which had nothing to do with the real world
and some guys spent a lot of time to understand how to calculate efficiently the determinant
of a matrix on a computer.
Cheers
[1] http://primes.utm.edu/largest.html
[2] http://www.mersenne.org/
[3] http://folding.stanford.edu/
[4] http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Grassmann
