[XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Release - First Scientific Computing Cryptocurrency

[Trillium]

Right click desktop, New -> Shortcut

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "runlow" /low C:\primecoin-0.1.1-hp5-winx64\primecoin-qt.exe -gen -setgenerate true -1 -sievesize=4000000

 

(Sievesize = 1000000 is used by default if you don't specify)

[myself]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills%27_constant
can one use Mills' constant to mine primes ?

[8bitPunk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills%27_constant
can one use Mills' constant to mine primes ?

I don't believe so. Primecoin is specifically looking for Cunningham Chains (of the first and second kind and bitwin). Mills' constant could be used to find primes, but it won't help to find primes that form Cunningham Chains of sufficient length to satisfy the proof of work for Primecoin blocks.

[keenanpepper]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills%27_constant
can one use Mills' constant to mine primes ?

Firstly, primecoin is based on Cunningham chains, not single primes (as someone already said).

Secondly, you could use Mills' constant to find primes... if you knew Mills' constant to arbitrary precision... but nobody does, since the only way to calculate Mills' constant is by finding a bunch of primes. =)

[eule]

SunnyKing or anyone else with a good grasp on how primecoin mining works, do you think the GPY sieve described in this article http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/twin-primes/all/ and this http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0508185 paper could be useful i.e. faster than the sieve of Eratosthenes?

From the wired article:

The Sieve of Eratosthenes works perfectly to identify primes, but it is too cumbersome and inefficient to be used to answer theoretical questions. Over the past century, number theorists have developed a collection of methods that provide useful approximate answers to such questions.

“The Sieve of Eratosthenes does too good a job,” Goldston said. “Modern sieve methods give up on trying to sieve perfectly.”

GPY developed a sieve that filters out lists of numbers that are plausible candidates for having prime pairs in them. To get from there to actual prime pairs, the researchers combined their sieving tool with a function whose effectiveness is based on a parameter called the level of distribution that measures how quickly the prime numbers start to display certain regularities.

The level of distribution is known to be at least ½. This is exactly the right value to prove the GPY result, but it falls just short of proving that there are always pairs of primes with a bounded gap.

Since we don't try to prove that there is an infinite number of primechains, it should work, right? Discussed here too https://bitcointalk.org

[myself]

Secondly, you could use Mills' constant to find primes... if you knew Mills' constant to arbitrary precision... but nobody does, since the only way to calculate Mills' constant is by finding a bunch of primes. =)

Caldwell & Cheng (2005) used this method to compute almost seven thousand base 10 digits of Mills' constant under the assumption that the Riemann hypothesis is true. There is no closed-form formula known for Mills' constant, and it is not even known whether this number is rational (Finch 2003).

also did not some average mathematician put some paper that the max distance from prime number to prime numbers is less that 70 millions

[eule]

That's what the wired article i posted is about. 

[refer_2_me]

I have not tested anything, nor do I pretend to really understand all the number theory stuff, but @primedigger mentioned in his GPU development post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258982.0 that he switched to the sieve of Atkin. Is there reason to believe that would work? Reading the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Atkin) it seems to me that it should be faster. Alternatively, these other sieves like GPY.

[mustyoshi]

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

[rethaw]

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

One of the big players was probably updating their primecoind.

[maka]

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

It's not just for a few blocks.  The difficulty is decreasing.  Seems we are stable around 9.24, for now.

[mustyoshi]

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

It's not just for a few blocks.  The difficulty is decreasing.  Seems we are stable around 9.24, for now.

That would explain the difficulty decreasing by .001 over the last 3 hours.

Now that CPU mining has hit it's limit, what will GPU mining bring?

[MobGod]

need a little input from sonny also you guys would you like to see me add this coin to
http://lotto.coinworld.us   

[maka]

I don't think CPU mining hit limit.  When more pools are available, more people may join mining.  It's hard to estimate how much more mining power one can benefit from GPU, maybe less than 10, or maybe more than 100.  The algorithm can be improved too, although we may need some serious mathematicians to take a look...

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

It's not just for a few blocks.  The difficulty is decreasing.  Seems we are stable around 9.24, for now.

That would explain the difficulty decreasing by .001 over the last 3 hours.

Now that CPU mining has hit it's limit, what will GPU mining bring?

[oxfeeefeee]

I don't think CPU mining hit limit.  When more pools are available, more people may join mining.  It's hard to estimate how much more mining power one can benefit from GPU, maybe less than 10, or maybe more than 100.  The algorithm can be improved too, although we may need some serious mathematicians to take a look...

Block time seems to be roughly around or above 1 minute now.

Are all the botnets priming away? Or  is that why the block times are so normal?

EDIT: nvm seems it was only for a few blocks.

It's not just for a few blocks.  The difficulty is decreasing.  Seems we are stable around 9.24, for now.

That would explain the difficulty decreasing by .001 over the last 3 hours.

Now that CPU mining has hit it's limit, what will GPU mining bring?

If you know something about Big Number calculation and the nature of GPUs, you know it's a lot harder for the GPU to do prime test than to do hashing.
GPUs don't like branching and memory access is also limited.

[LazyOtto]

a lot more harder

Is English not your native language, oxfeeefeee?

The question is sincere and not intended to harass you if you have learned English as a second / nth language.

[usahero]

If you know something about Big Number calculation and the nature of GPUs, you know it's a lot more harder for the GPU to do prime test than to do hashing.
GPUs don't like branching and memory access is also limited.

Yeah, right.

Thats as true as no asics for scrypt. ))))

[mhps]

need a little input from sonny also you guys would you like to see me add this coin to
http://lotto.coinworld.us   

It's usually easier to get poeple's  help if you can get their name right.

[oxfeeefeee]

a lot more harder

Is English not your native language, oxfeeefeee?

The question is sincere and not intended to harass you if you have learned English as a second / nth language.

Thank you, it's corrected.

[oxfeeefeee]

If you know something about Big Number calculation and the nature of GPUs, you know it's a lot more harder for the GPU to do prime test than to do hashing.
GPUs don't like branching and memory access is also limited.

Yeah, right.

Thats as true as no asics for scrypt. ))))

Primecoin mining is not another scrypt.

Scrypt is just another hashing algorithm, and hashing algorithms are generally the best candidates for GPU to do. Because they tend to have no branching, and the width of the input& output are fixed in *each* step.
That's why sha256 on GPU is so easy.

Scrypt tried to be GPU-proof by introducing random memory access, and it failed probably due to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt):

"The large memory requirements of scrypt come from a large vector of pseudorandom bit strings that are generated as part of the algorithm. Once the vector is generated, the elements of it are accessed in a pseudo-random order, and combined to produce the derived key. A straightforward implementation would need to keep the entire vector in random access memory so that it can be accessed as needed.
Because the elements of the vector are generated algorithmically, each element could be generated on the fly as needed, only storing one element in memory at a time and therefore cutting the memory requirements significantly..."

Big number calculation used by Primecoin is a totally different beast. it's doable, but i'll definitely be much slower.