Numbers of wonders part 1

Wonder what numbers has to do in a tech blog? I will tell you.
In a series of posts we will explore a group of numbers that are fascinating and mysterious. Let us start with prime numbers.

Prime Numbers

A prime number is a number which has only two factors, 1 and the number itself. In other words it is divisible only by 1 and itself.
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97....
Prime numbers are enigma not only for the school children but the top mathematicians and even the best computing machines of our time. I was fascinated by the beauty of the numbers many times. They are the building blocks or atoms of all other numbers. Any other number can be represented as a product of two or more prime numbers. The fact that they are still mysterious even in the time of super computers of teraflops of computing power, makes them more enigmatic and appealing for the world's top brains.

Though the distribution may seem random, they forms special patterns when arranged in certain manners(image below).

(image courtesy www.franken.de)

If it is not fascinating then what is?. It looks as mysterious as theNazca Lines .

Nature has a special place for numbers in its creativity. You will see numbers like Golden ratio, Fibonasci numbers, pi, e, and Phi. Suddenly it comes to my mind that Prime numbers too have significance that we have not found yet(or may be I). Though the numbers are easy to understand, their identification and computation are done using complex algorithms that takes lot of computing power, especially when the number of digits are high. Thus some of those algorithms are used to benchmark computer chips.
In my point of view, the there are lot more to be revealed about the prime numbers. The largest prime number revealed to us can be seen as a benchmark for the level of technological advancement of human civilization itself.
Prime numbers are important in computing as well.Several public-key cryptography algorithms, such as RSA, are based on large prime numbers (for example with 512 bits)
They are so important that there are a number of distributed computing projects initiated in order to find large prime numbers that require large amount of computing power.
Some of the projects are:

• GIMPS searches for Mersenne primes.


• PrimeGrid searches for megaprimes.


• Seventeen or Bust searches for primes which can help prove that 78557 is the smallest Sierpinski number.


• Twin Prime Search searches for record twin primes


• Wieferich@Home searches for Wieferich primes.

Here are some links for more information
Prime numbers on Wikipedia
Patterns in Primes
Prime Numbers at MathWorld
Article from The Seed magazine
Some Results of Computational Research in Prime Numbers
End of Numbers of wonder part 1
more numbers to come

The Zii stemcell computing mystery solved

After the specultions and hype campaigns Creative Technology Ltd. today revealed the mysterious- the so called "Stemcell computing" platform. It turns out to be an architecture for a new kind of multimedia SOCs(System-on-chip). There are two processors the ZMZ05 and DMS05. The name stemcell is used to represent the flexibility of the architecture to progammability. Stem cells are the embryonic cells which turnes in to all other kind of cells in a organism later. The device is based on programmable arrays called Processing Elements. These are said to be flexible and completely programmable and can be used to develop many type of applications with minimal additional hardware like stem cells.

- Flexibile Media-Rich SoC - Software Defined Silicon acceleration
- Complete Platform Solutions - Ready-for-Market Platform Solutions and Development Kits
- Advance Middleware - A rich-suite of development tools and middleware
- Incredible Scalability - from 10 Gigaflops to Peta FLOPS
- Energy Efficient - High density processing architecture for reduced power consumption

For detailed specifications refer the link: ZMS05


After many speculations about the Stemcell computing, the hype is settled now. According to Creative:

"With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination."

The multimedia processor may be targetting from handheld devices to highend gaming consoles and boshes teraflops of scalable performance. Something that can be comaprable to supercomputers. We can expect some great stuff like the Nintendo Wii or Apple iphone like gadgets or like Sony playstation like consoles. Array of Playstation 3 processors already claimed of attaining supercomputing performance(story).

Some application areas mentioned in the Zii website are

- PMP, PND and MID
- NetBook
- Video Conferencing
- Video Surveillance
- Smartphone and PDA
- IP Media
- Medical
- Embedded Systems

Let us wait and see what wonders the Zii will do to the world of computing.