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
Wake up babe, new prime number just dropped.
Holy hell
Oontz oontz oontz oontz! Priiiiiiiime numbuh, bay bee!
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!
oh buddy, I … I’ve got terrible news for you …
Half-Life 2136279841-1 confirmed.
Almost certainly a multiple of 2 minus one
24 is the highest number.
To save you a click: 2136,279,841-1
Formatting is off.
2^136,279,841 - 1
2 to the power of something, then subtract one to make it an odd number.
What Lemmy client are you using? Looks OK on the web and Jerboa.
Sync for Lemmy.
Here’s the source of their comment.
Sync still uses Reddit’s markdown rules, Lemmy is a little different.
Well this was 8 months ago.
https://lemmy.world/post/12509081
Still outstanding on Github
https://github.com/laurencedawson/sync-for-lemmy/issues/477
I assume the numbers never made business sense for them to continue development.
I assume the numbers never made business sense for them to continue development.
I guess so.
I was sorta waiting for Sync to become more fully featured before committing to an ad-free purchase, but I guess I should start looking for other clients again.I use Jerboa out of habit because it’s the first one I downloaded that more or less worked that also had the coloured bars down the side of the comments so I could keep track of what level of the comment thread Im looking at.
Heard good things about Thunder though.
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I’m also using sync
Using Eternity and formatting was off for me. Second reply comment was good though
I’m pretty sure that’s the telephone number of a flat in Islington where I once went to a party…
Hope you hit him in his two heads
Yeah…they called but I told them it wasn’t you.
Babe wake up, new prime number just dropped.
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.
No first time ever. This isn’t a supercomputer, it’s a distributed cloud network that they’re referring to as a supercomputer because it has a lot of power. It’s not a supercomputer in any other sense of the word, as it’s set up on cloud providers around the globe rather than in one location in the same room.
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.
that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.
And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)
🤯
Me wondering why I haven’t been able to deploy cloud instances with the A100 for an actual useful purpose for the past month
Already on the H100 bud
He must’ve been very anxious in order to count up to that…
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 :-)
Solar freaking roadways
Great satire. This is how you do it, folks.
Now I want to try too: The ultimate form of democracy is when people are voting with their wallets. Then they can have the freedom to express both what they want and how much they want it. That is why profitable = good and freedom, actually.
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Is this Poe’s law? I genuinely thought this was satire but the downvotes and responses are very serious!
I think it’s satirizing the other guy in these comments.
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.
All knowledge is good knowledge
Ohhh, you’ve never gained pandemic weight and then gone shopping for jeans in public and seen yourself in a mirror, have you
Wat?
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.
It is easily provable that there is an infinite number of prime numbers.
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).
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.)
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…
It’s not just about primes, it’s about proving the technologies and techniques needed to verify such a number is prime, which might then be extrapolated to things unrelated to proving things prime.
For example, GIMPS (the organisation behind this find) was a great example of distributed computing long before people had multiprocessor supercomputers in their homes.
But let’s not forget the hobby factor. You don’t get to decide what other people do for fun. If they want to lend a portion of their computer’s runtime to a distributed computing project, that’s up to them.
Some people climb tall mountains, and that’s not of much use to anyone either.
Right. Like I shouldn’t have a say in Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and others starting dead Nuclear Reactors up to feed the power hungry data centers they run to exactly.
I’M clearly the problem here.
I’M clearly the problem here.
Here specifically, very much so yes.
No, you’re just an idiot, you’re not a problem, you’re not significant enough to ever amount to a problem, you’ll be forgotten 5 minutes after you’re dead.
But, at least you have your impotent rage?
They literally told you how it’s used for practical applications and you just ignored it. It makes cryptography stronger, hence your password less likely to be broken. National secrets less likely to be leaked. Your identity less likely to be stolen.
I wouldn’t bother arguing with this person. They’re either trolling or intentionally ignorant - either way, you will lose to their vast experience.
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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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Even if it’s true, he’s just admitting that he doesn’t care about future generations. Fuck them kids, I guess.
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.
If smart people thought like this, we won’t have cryptography.
All knowledge is good knowledge
Finally! Someone who understands! If it’s not something we can understand, it’s not really math.
