Monday, March 13, 2023

A million-digit Leyland prime (lghu)

Twenty-five days after I started my million-digit Leyland prime search last year, Gabor Levai — who goes by the handle "lghu" on Mersenne forum: small L, not capital i — discovered a 1000027-digit example that was in my purview.

He's done it again! This morning, eighteen days after I started my new run, Gabor posted a 1000175-digit, new prime that was in the range of Leyland number pairs I was prepared to look at this year. In fact, when I was sieving my pairs I had a choice of going low (1000100 digits up to 1000200 digits) or going higher (as high as 1000900 digits up to 1001000 digits) and I chose the lower range as I had convinced myself that Gabor was probably not engaged in a like-minded endeavour.

The advantage for me of going low is that my searching is exhaustive. Having already looked at all Leyland number pairs of 1000000 digits up to 1000100 digits, finding a new PRP in the range of 1000100 digits up to 1000200 digits would allow me to (eventually) say that that the new PRP and the previous 1000027-digit one are consecutive Leyland primes.

Update (March 15): I have ceased my new run on the understanding that Gabor will himself check all of the intervening Leyland candidate pairs for primality. Indications are that he can do this faster than I. Coincidentally, I found a new 386805-digit prime early this morning, the first such since 2 May 2022.

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