Comment on New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoIt’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.
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
That segment exists. That’s literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Again, to what use?
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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.
AlotOfReading@lemmy.world 4 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.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Well allow me to retort:
There isn’t a CPU on this planet that will digest this number in any meaningful way out to this decimal. Not as a whole at least.
That’s why this was clearly computer on a GPU. They’re good at that.
We also have news of the first stages of prime numbers being cracked on Quantum Computers with amazing efficiency. So whatever this number is will be useless soon.