"4D. The Lucas-Lehmer test began on Sun Jul 20 12:33:46 2008 PDT and concluded on Sat Aug 23 00:29:27 2008 PDT. That's a total of 33 1/2 days. The Dell Optiplex was the only computer used to initially prove this candidate prime. However, the computer was part of GIMPS' "PrimeNet" network of roughly 75,000 computers testing other Mersenne number candidates."
It didnt take one computer 33 days, it took 75,000 computers searching simultaneously to find a prime.
edit: The next largest prime, at 17 million digits, took a further 5 years of searching on a network that has over 100 TFLOP/s of compute power [1].
A decade before that, Sun workstations that cost $30k each were used for long-running engineering tests like chip verification, while an Optiplex is less than 10% of that.
Brexit Prize
by Institute of Economic Affairs
2013 - 2014
€100,000
Find the best plan for a UK exit from the European Union.
So I looked for the plan. Here it is:
http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files...
Folks, this is 15,000 words. That means he got paid $6 per word to write that. I personally skimmed the PDF, didn't find anything that caught my eye or even a point, based on the the abstract or the section titles and the whole framing, and wasn't left with the impression that the author even believed it. Perhaps his 15,000 word PDF won simply because nobody else bothered to put a plan together, not because there's anything great or wortwhile about such a plan.
So forget "lander on mars". Win a prize that consists of a meaty term paper on some stupid proposition. A+ as a term paper, though.
The competition wasn't really about whether the UK should go or not, which is the main political part. Rather, the starting point is that a referendum has decided "go", and the competition was to find the best way of extricating the UK from existing institutions/agreements, what should replace them, and how.
However, the remit is very unclear on the criteria used to judge entries.
With current EC2 prices (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/) , for $100k one can run a c4.8xlarge instance (36 cores) for 2244 days, so for a comparable time for the 2009 award, you can run (2244/33)x36=2448 cores rather than two. Assuming that's adequate to discover the 100M digit prime, that's a net profit of $50k!
Since no body has done this there must be some significant flaws in the naive analysis above. What are they? What is a rough estimate of how fast the computational load would go up from 10M to 100M to 1B digit prime search?