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

  • _bcron_@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    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?

    • wagesj45@fedia.io
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      14 days ago

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

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        14 days ago

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

          • catloaf@lemm.ee
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            14 days 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
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              14 days 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.