Idk, looks like we're doing pretty good so far.

Yes indeed, some amazing records have been established, and they will probably be broken very soon.
But don't forget that "finding a prime number" is not exactly as difficult as "finding out if a given number is prime".

And 17 million digits... it's very small compared to something like 10^(17 million) digits. And I'm talking about numbers of the second kind (or even vastly larger than that), that will remain out of range for eternity.

That's a Mersenne prime though, no? The largest prime that we've performed non-Mersenne primality testing on is much smaller than that. It would take forever to verify that as prime with the standard tests.

10^17 million digits is not all that much larger than 17 million digits.

Edit nvm I'm stupid rofl. Was thinking how many 0 's are on 10^17 don't listen to me

This post was edited by sentries on Dec 4 2014 01:28pm

Simplest question to ask:
If your number is 1 say idk, if it is 2 say yes, if it's 3, say no, what do you say?

lol, this works but was looking for sumthing less direct

Tell him you wrote either 3/2 or 5/2 on a piece of paper. Ask him if his number is greater.

Offer him a game of rock paper scissors where you only throw rock or paper at random, but he can only throw rock if his number is 1, paper if his number is 2, and scissors if his number is 3. Rematch if tie. Ask him if he'd eventually win.

What about

"I'm thinking of a positive odd number. When you divide my number by yours, is it a whole number?"

or

"Let n be your number. Does 𝕤^(3n-2) have an exotic smooth structure?"
Edit: not sure what level math you're in, so you might not understand the second one

This post was edited by cdexswzaq on Dec 5 2014 06:22pm

That's nice.

Also, resting on the same idea as my first one but more elegant:

"If I were to pick one of the two numbers that you did not pick, would my number be greater than your number?"

Coming back to this again because it's pretty fun.

"It's the 4th quarter and your basketball team is behind by 2. You score some points equal to your number and the opposing team scores none. Do you end up winning the game?"