The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), using excess CPU capacity on the net, has turned up the largest prime number now known: 2^2976221 - 1, with 895,932 digits. M-36 was discovered on 24Aug97 by Gordon Spence, using a Pentium running code written by George Woltman . . [Carsten Schafer , tsg, 08Sep97. Bill Park.] (There are more to be found, so your chance for fleeting fame is still open.)

Project RC5 is a distributed attempt to beat the RSA Secret-Key Challenge. A side effect is that the search is benchmarking various processors on this computational task. A 180MHz Pentium Pro can search from 413 kk/s (thousand keys per second) under Windows 95, or 461 kk/s under Linux. A 180MHz 603e Mac can do 434 kk/s, and a 350MHz 604e Mac 9600 can do 1012 kk/s. Check for other configurations and operating systems, or for Project RC5. [Netsurfer's Digest. Network News, 19Oct97.]

Startup company Optech Solutions says it has "a super-efficient global optimization algorithm" discovered while researching the protein folding problem. . [Jim Pulfer , sci.op-research, 15Oct97. David Joslin.]

The UK Planning and Scheduling SIG has a new online bibliography with almost 3K references. Papers include topics in robotics, formal logics, and NLP. Contributions are solicited, and may be in bibtex, refer, tib, rfc1807, rfc1357, procite, inspec, or medline format. . [James Soutter , comp.ai, 25Sep97. David Joslin.]