Twin Prime Search finds record twins

[jmblazek]

On January 15, 2007, the Twin Prime Search (TPS) project, in collaboration with PrimeGrid (BOINC platform), found the largest known twin primes:

2003663613*2^195000-1
and
2003663613*2^195000+1.

The two primes are 58711 digits long which surpass the previous record of 51780 digits.

The twin find surprized all of us. We had just finished voting for the next n so we could start sieving. Voting ended Dec. 31, so we only have a couple of weeks sieving on the file.

With that said, the sieve depth is woefully inadequate. The long term optimum sieve depth is 20P to 30P. The short term optimum sieve depth is 5P. We are currently at 0.5T.

The plan is to send PrimeGrid work even though we know this is currently inefficient. However, if we get to 1P (more would be better) in the next week we can greatly minimize the damage. It would eliminate ~3.5 million k. 1P in the next week is ~20 extra hosts on the project.

Unfortunately, there are no points for this...just helping out a project in need. It would only be for a week. If you're interested, please visit this page:

http://www.elaurian.org/tpsieving/

This is a manual process...nothing automated about it. The current dat file is 141MB zipped, 718MB unzipped.

Once the week is up, you might like to stay and sieve more, head over to PrimeGrid and join the Twin Prime Search there, or return to the project you were working on. Feel free to spread the word about our need for help. Thanks!