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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Project concept & logistics

  • Collaborative project to have humans read aloud all digits of the current largest known prime (a Mersenne prime) before a larger one is found.
  • Digits are split into ~419‑digit chunks, targeting ~100k participants and ~41M digits total.
  • Some wonder why 419 was chosen and whether there are chunk repetitions or deduping.
  • Questions arise about YouTube constraints: max playlist length, longevity of 100k+ personal channels, and whether hosting everything on YouTube is ideal.

Time and feasibility

  • Rough estimates:
    • Binary version: ~136M bits → ~41M seconds → ~473 days continuous speaking.
    • Decimal digits at ~2 digits/sec → ~237 days.
  • Some argue one determined person could do it alone in a few years, factoring in sleep and breaks, and potentially beat the next-largest-prime discovery.
  • Others note prior gaps between record primes vary (6 years vs ~1 year), so timing is uncertain.

Verification & error handling

  • Concerns about prank participants or mistakes in recitation.
  • Proposed verification approaches:
    • Auto-transcription (YouTube captions, Whisper, LLM transcription) compared against the assigned chunk.
    • Human review of transcripts, with diffing against the prime digits.
  • Debate on whether mere speech-to-text is enough, given corrections like “oops, that was wrong, let me redo.” Some argue semantics are required; others say you only need to see that every digit appears in order somewhere in the clip.

Representation, bases, and naming

  • Discussion of saying the number in binary vs decimal. Binary Mersenne primes are just long runs of “1”, making errors less likely but videos monotonous.
  • Jokes and side ideas: base‑largest‑prime representation (“1”), hex form (0xFFFF…), or compressing via run-length encoding.
  • Thread explores naming such enormous numbers in extended “‑illion” systems; someone notes the name becomes extremely long and unwieldy.

Value, purpose, and automation

  • Some see the project as whimsical art and harmless fun; others call it a pointless waste of resources.
  • Motivations cited: curiosity, pushing computational and collaborative limits, “because they’re there.”
  • One person automates reading by stitching prerecorded digits 0–9; others debate whether this undermines the human/creative spirit of the project or still “counts” since it’s their own voice.

Cryptography and practical relevance

  • Question raised: does the current largest prime have practical use?
  • Responses: modern cryptography relies on prime factorization difficulty but uses much smaller primes; record Mersenne primes are not directly used.
  • Another view: chasing largest primes advances algorithms and theory, even if individual primes aren’t practical.