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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (13 children)

It feels like people are celebrating this but hating on ai developments. not sure if these people are hypocritical or if that's two different groups of people.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Size does matter, after all?

[+] [email protected] -35 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

I don't understand this and therefore it's stupid and pointless. Fuck you math elitist assholes with your so-called "large" prime numbers spending billions of dollars that could be used to make my life better. I don't comprehend this at all and there it does not matter. The end.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

This is a very dangerous way of thinking. You cannot tell at the time of discovery if specific research will be useful or not down the line. You need to advance the research in all directions, even if some of them seem silly or useless, or else you will handicap your progress in other fields which you didn't see the connection with at first.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

All knowledge is good knowledge

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ohhh, you’ve never gained pandemic weight and then gone shopping for jeans in public and seen yourself in a mirror, have you

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you want it to be useful for the economy and industry in order to warrant funding, I've got news for you:

The majority of modern encryption relies on prime numbers. It is currently speculated but not known, that the number of prime numbers is infinite.

Should it be proven, that there are only a finite amount of prime numbers, all encryption would become vulnerable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It is easily provable that there is an infinite number of prime numbers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Many encryption algorithms rely on the assumption that the factorizations of numbers in prime numbers has an exponential cost and not a polynomial cost (I.e. is a NP problem and not P, and we don't know if P != NP although many would bet on it). Whether there are infinite prime numbers or not is really irrelevant in the context you are mentioning, because encryption relies on factorizing finite numbers of relatively fixed sizes.

The problem is that for big numbers like n=p*q (where p and q are both prime) it's expensive to recover p and q given n.

Note that actually more modern ciphers don't rely on this (like elliptic curve crypto).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

There are infinite prime numbers. This has been known for thousands of years. You can find numerous proofs of this online, and go through them until one makes sense to you.

Also, quantum computers are on track to make division-based cryptography useless in the next decade or two. (Note that this only affects public key cryptography, and not shared key cryptography. So your online backups should be safe as long as you have a password for them.)

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