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

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    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.

    • catloaf
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      8 hours ago

      They literally just told you. Prime numbers have applicability in cryptography.

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
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          7 hours ago

          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.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            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.