Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the Largest Prime Number

Re:Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the La... by SeanLuke on Thursday February 07, 2013 @09:24AM (#5182158)

> The new number has 17,425,170 digits—just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file

Um, what?

Even if you include commas... um, what?

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Re:Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the La... by SixteenBlue on Thursday February 07, 2013 @09:31AM (#5182196)

If you include commas that's 23,233,560 characters, which would be 22.15 megabytes (at one byte per char). Maybe 22.45 is just a typo?

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Re:Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the La... by nicktelford on Thursday February 07, 2013 @10:06AM (#5182389)

There are line breaks at a fixed interval so that it wraps at 80 chars. I imagine that makes up the other ~300KB.

Edit: Line-breaks do indeed make up the bulk of the overhead, but it's also an HTML page so there's some boilerplate markup at the beginning and end of the file.

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Re:Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the La... by evilduck on Thursday February 07, 2013 @10:03AM (#5182367)

Maybe document container formatting overhead? Filesystem/disk block sizes?

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