On: The largest known prime number has emerged. It has...

[speleo_engr]

Calling it brute force isn't quite right. There is an efficient algorithm for prime determination (Lucas-Lehmer primality test) on Mersenne Primes (numbers of the form 2^p-1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas–Lehmer_primality_test

[colbyh → speleo_engr]

Thanks for the reminder! And this is my bad because I was paywalled on my phone and didn't see that it was, in fact, a mersenne prime that was found.