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
Is it 3?
I bet it’s 3.
My money’s on 4.
Can I go with 6? I kinda like 6
No, but I bet it’s multiple of 6!
this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’
The first time since the 90’s, before that all computer assisted Mercel primes found were found by super computers.
I don’t know if this is a common feature of large primes, but the digits in the exponent (136,279,841) themselves represent a prime number.
🤯
Me wondering why I haven’t been able to deploy cloud instances with the A100 for an actual useful purpose for the past month
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.
Primes are actually useful…
Cryptography is moving away from primes. Given the theoretical danger of quantum computer over them.
Latices is what will theoretically be used in the future for cryptography.
You can dislike corporate hype around ai and celebrate someone finding a legitimate use case for ai.
Yeah. Stuff like this, work in medical treatments and new drugs, I’m on board.
Using it to replace human workers or steal their hard work to train them?
Fuck you sideways with a cactus, you corporate fucks.
No, you really can’t. Same cycles are wasted either way and have zero benefits except for bragging rights. Fucking dumb.
Primes are useful for unique combinations in cryptography, for securing and encrypting connections and communications as well as storing sensitive data such as account ledgers.
AI is the opposite of useful, it creates fake information to dilute real information.
Watch me, jabroni. I’m doing it right now.
Jabroni. So cool…
So now you’re concerned with “looking cool”. Your priorities are very strange.
Size does matter, after all?
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.
Yeah, fuck those assholes that pursue science for the benefit of humanity! I do not see why anyone should be allowed to be creative if I do not see the benefit for me in particular.
We need to decide democratically what science is, with everyone getting a fair vote, so wasteful science like this can finally be stopped.
Like voting on which science is right lol?
That’s how we end up with solar roadways…
Much of the basis for the RSA cryptosystem, and by extension much of modern computing, was done by some mathematician who prided himself that his work was not applied mathematics and could not ever be applied in any way (bonus point for being pertinent to the topic of large primes). Science is exploratory work, not a straight path to some predefined goal. The person above is evidently clueless as to how science is conducted.
Yes I’m with you 100% there :-)
I think we have already done that and you just disagree with what we have agreed to categorize as science. This shouldn’t stop you from making your own computers and have them do whatever you’d like though.
Because, well…. That’s democracy.
If Jesus had wanted us to use prime numbers why did he turn the water into wine and not numbers? Checkmate atheists. /s
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.
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.
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).
And this helps humanity and mathematicians by…nothing. It’s absolutely nothing.
If we can analyze larger primes, we can generate larger primes which has applications in math, particularly cryptography and other areas, not even beginning to look at number theory. Specifically being able to verify them over a cloud is useful, we can generate them quicker and worry about their safety less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hensel’s_lemma has uses in physics actually.
Oh, you mean you don’t understand it, gotcha.
Yes, and Bayesian statistics are useless too, they’re all about things that have already happened!
No. I understand it plenty. Quantifying shit to the Nth degree doesn’t fix anything. It makes math more precise, but math that will never be used for any practical applications.
Please inform me about the ways this information and “breakthrough” will be used in a meaningful way that matters at all.
They literally just told you. Prime numbers have applicability in cryptography.
And the highest degree of that is not used. So…
math that will never be used for any practical applications.
Ummmmm…… what?
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Yes. The amount of effort and resources used to do this shouldn’t just be a fucking waste.
This is a fucking waste. Proper fucking waste.
Nobody will use this math in our lifetime. Probably not the next generation either. We’re incapable of using it in any meaningful way except bragging rights.
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It’s not a presumption when there is no basis for it all. It’s a fucking fact.
If there was a segment of society that said “Hey, we really want to do this thing, but we really just need the highest prime number possible! Why won’t anyone find that for us?” Then I’d say OK.
You’ve got a guy out to beat a record and get his name on the books here. Useless.
That segment exists. That’s literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.
Again, to what use?
No idea, I’m neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they’re used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it’s a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.
Finally! Someone who understands! If it’s not something we can understand, it’s not really math.
