I'm kind of a nerd, but there is this project called GIMPS(Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search).The goal of this project is to find Mersenne Prime(2^p-1) numbers.Now heres where the money comes in, The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a $100,000 award to the person or group who finds a 10 million digit prime number first.The GIMPS offers free software for testing mersenne primes, the downfall is they take some of the prize money for using their software,Anyway if you were to find one today you would still get $50,000.This program runs in the background at a low priority, it gets potential numbers from a server and then tests them on your computer.This is not a scam or in any way harmful to you or your computer.Though it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a whole year just to test one number,Its still a free chance at $50k for doing nothing, just letting your computer run primality tests when you aren't using it.Check it out, it is worth using NONE of your time for a chance at $50k, isn't it?

http://www.mersenne.org
Or skip to the money part http://www.mersenne.org/prize.htm

HOLLY ASS! 10 million digits! good luck im not gona even try...

Chances aren't to great, some where in the ballpark of like 1 in 300,000 but it's still worth a try.

:woowoo: 500mhz takes a full year to test one , i'm at 4x that, 4 in a year.

Some guy already won it. Its in the news today.

you can still go for bigger though.

Who found one? What news is this in? I've heard nothing about it.

You must be talking about the 6.3 million digit one found last month.He doesn't get anything for finding it either, until some in the project finds a 10 million digit one, then that guy gets $5000.

My question is what does this guy (or company) need the number for? There must be some way to make a profit from it of he's shelling out 50k. Is it for some kind of super mathematical equation he needs to make a time machine or something :smoker: . There must be some reason why he needs a number like that. I don't know, something just smells fishy about this.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers the award.They are a non profit foundation for the advancement of computing and the internet.The awards are to encourage cooperative computing,normal internet users to allow their computers to be used in large scientific problems.Nothing is fishy ,the awards for finding primes total over half million dollars, and are donated by various groups and peolpe.

http://www.eff.org/awards/coop.html