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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)

submitted 2 weeks ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] pftbest@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 weeks 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.