Size does matter, after all?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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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.
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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.
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just_another_person@lemmy.world
-18 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)
(2 children)
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.
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secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world
-30 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)
(15 children)
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.
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.
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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.
Nah. I can take the downvote and still be on the right side of things.
Can, but aren't.
Doing just fine 😘
Ever heard the saying "if one guy is an asshole, he's an asshole. If everyone is an asshole, you're the asshole"?
Not saying you're an asshole, but that is to say you're the only one defending your viewpoint, and you are welcome to it. But we'd all appreciate consideration of the information as opposed to the offense you seem to be taking.
Nuance exists everywhere in our complicated world.
The example that springs to mind is when we discovered that Archimedes invented the foundations of calculus long before Newton and Leibniz. The argument typically goes that the foundations of mathematics would be much further along had this discovery been realized but many others argue that we would have had no practical way to apply it in the time that Archimedes lived.
Now the part that I think you are missing is that the interesting part is not only that we now know that a new number is prime, but that knowing that a number is prime involves verifying that a number is prime and the larger the number is, the more difficult it is to verify so this almost always involves landmark advances in math and computing. Especially since prime numbers are distributed asymptotically meaning they are typically a few orders of magnitude larger than the previous one.
Totally.
Have you also heard the saying "Somebody Somewhere is sick of your bullshit'?
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?
Yes, my thoughts and dick no longer work. That covers all of your statements. I still have a problem with this.
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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.
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.
Well allow me to retort:
There isn't a CPU on this planet that will digest this number in any meaningful way out to this decimal. Not as a whole at least.
That's why this was clearly computed on a GPU. They're good at that.
We also have news of the first stages of prime numbers being cracked on Quantum Computers with amazing efficiency. So whatever this number is will be useless soon.
Finally! Someone who understands! If it's not something we can understand, it's not really math.
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