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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    11 days ago

    We need to decide democratically what science is, with everyone getting a fair vote, so wasteful science like this can finally be stopped.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Like voting on which science is right lol?

      That’s how we end up with solar roadways…

      • Urist@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        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.

      • Urist@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        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.

    • WrenFeathers@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.