Let's hear a cheer for the number three – the super-prime digit and signifier of the Christian trinity, or a mobile phone network, depending on the type of altar you worship at.
They performed a priming study in which the effect of a briefly presented prime (Arabic digit or dot display) on the naming of a subsequently presented target number (Arabic digit or dot display) was evaluated.
MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com".
It read "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of }.com".
The digit prime and color target were congruent on 50% of the trials.
The first 10-digit prime in is 7427466391, which starts at the 99th digit.
The campaign group Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a prize for the first 1m-digit and 10m-digit primes, and will give $150,000£96,00000) to the discoverer of the first 100m-digit prime.
Other projects have found million-digit prime numbers, deciphered secret codes and helped in the design of storage containers for nuclear waste.
Discovering the four-million-digit prime has inspired the group to go after a $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization involved in privacy issues, for finding one with 10 million digits.
The current highest prime is 17m digits long and was discovered on a computer in Warrensburg, Missouri, as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search Gimpss), a distributed computing project that has involved tens of thousands of machines since 1996.
Participants were presented with one of four achromatic digit primes that evoked color photisms followed by one of four color targets.
