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
I don’t know why Nvidia is mentioned at all, except the hardware. That’s cool that this person found the number, but Nvidia didn’t do anything except employ them once upon a time and make a product that does a thing. It’s not justified to celebrate the maker of a stove when a soup kitchen feeds everyone.
This is a win for Luke and GIMPS in general, and I’m happy for them.
This is the first such prime that was discovered using GPU cloud computing. It’s not just an incredible new discovery, but also a demonstration of what this type of hardware network may be capable.
I didn’t use to do this, but with the world being on fire I feel like I should ask whether the amount of energy put into finding huge primes is really worth it.
Why is anything worth the effort?
Cause research into primes makes computer security stronger. Cause research in general can make new discoveries that can lead to unexpected improvements in life.
Cause we need to know the answer to everything.
Cause it’s better than mining crypto or doing AI training models over and over.
I used to be all on board with that, but seeing what a colossal waste of resources AI is, I’ve come to question other efforts like this one or calculating pi to a trillion digits. The trigger here for me was the use of GPUs, which I’ve come to associate with AI waste. Sure, I know they’re just a tool. But I still don’t see what value will come from knowing ever bigger prime numbers.
New math came out of it, they figured out more and more efficient ways to figure out the solution to “is this prime?”
Those same math techniques can be used for other problems, and possibly learn something that solves a problem you actually care about.
Research is important because you never know what weird problem someone is working on might solve. Maybe it will provide a new math solution that creates better CGI, maybe it’ll finally create a technique to solve fusion.
Maybe it’ll just be something that we know now that we didn’t know before. There are FAR FAR FAR more wasteful things in the world than some nerds trying to solve big prime numbers.
Widening the technology gap for a species of upright locusts intent on destroying the only place we exist.
I’d rather see anything that shows we’re not just cave-people with gadgets.
We define people by their labor value in capitalist societies. It only makes sense headlines would refer to people thru the lens of their previous employer.
They mention nvidia because that’s the hardware used to find/prove.
I find it quite relevant to have the person/ group, the strategy or method, and the device used (including chipsets). Most articles on prime number discovery will mention all these things.
The fact that he worked there seems pretty irrelevant tho.
also the person apparently spent 2 million dollars to find the number. and the money is probably from stock compensation from nvidia
I wonder if he wrote some of the CUDA code or anything like that.
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.
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.
Legit question: how is that different conceptually to the random individuals all running Prime95? Could that not also be referred to as a cloud supercomputer?
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
It feels like people are celebrating this but hating on ai developments. not sure if these people are hypocritical or if that’s two different groups of people.
Do you mean to say that this achievement had something to do with AI?
Fermat PRP testing with proofs instead of Lucas-Lehmer testing with full double checks
Looks like pure mathematics to me.
I think they’re comparing the huge amount of computing power used for both AI and finding primes.
Yes but when we use power to find new primes then we know them and can use them in cryptography, but if we use power on AI then we dilute current knowledge with fake knowledge. So it’s a pretty stark contrast imo.
You can dislike corporate hype around ai and celebrate someone finding a legitimate use case for ai.
Yeah. Stuff like this, work in medical treatments and new drugs, I’m on board.
Using it to replace human workers or steal their hard work to train them?
Fuck you sideways with a cactus, you corporate fucks.
No, you really can’t. Same cycles are wasted either way and have zero benefits except for bragging rights. Fucking dumb.
Primes are useful for unique combinations in cryptography, for securing and encrypting connections and communications as well as storing sensitive data such as account ledgers.
AI is the opposite of useful, it creates fake information to dilute real information.
Watch me, jabroni. I’m doing it right now.
Jabroni. So cool…
So now you’re concerned with “looking cool”. Your priorities are very strange.
Primes are actually useful…
Cryptography is moving away from primes. Given the theoretical danger of quantum computer over them.
Latices is what will theoretically be used in the future for cryptography.
Picking the largest known prime number feels like setting your password to password lol.
He must’ve been very anxious in order to count up to that…
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.
I think we have already done that and you just disagree with what we have agreed to categorize as science. This shouldn’t stop you from making your own computers and have them do whatever you’d like though.
Because, well…. That’s democracy.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
math that will never be used for any practical applications.
Ummmmm…… what?
Have you ever heard of the Riemann hypothesis? Since 1859 it’s yet to be solved. The generalization of prime numbers (i.e. a function f(n) that yields the nth prime) would impact fields such as Navigation Systems and Traffic Management, Communication Systems and Satellite Communication (i.e. your Internet connection could become more efficient and faster), Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quantum Mechanics, AI and Machine Learning, E-commerce, Finances and Algorithmic Trading, among many other fields. (Yeah, it seems like nothing. /s)
Does it need to? Does anything need to? I’d argue that humans toying with the novelty of ‘seemingly useless’ things has enriched humanity by a whole lot. Archmedes basically dicking around doing fuck all in that shed of his instead of growing crops
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.
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?
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.
Size does matter, after all?
