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

submitted 2 weeks 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] 28 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Nobody will use this math in our lifetime.

That's a presumption. Have you ever considered that there's a non-zero chance that you're wrong?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

Even if it's true, he's just admitting that he doesn't care about future generations. Fuck them kids, I guess.

[+] [email protected] -35 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That segment exists. That's literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.

[+] [email protected] -15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Again, to what use?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Any cryptography you're likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren't relevant for practical cryptography, they're just fun.