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

  • secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • el_abuelo@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Is this Poe’s law? I genuinely thought this was satire but the downvotes and responses are very serious!

    • njordomir@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If Jesus had wanted us to use prime numbers why did he turn the water into wine and not numbers? Checkmate atheists. /s

    • wieson@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • pftbest@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      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.