6 ms·
One year, 41M digits: How Luke Durant found the largest known prime number
- dang 2y agoRecent and related: GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^136279841 – 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41904237 - Oct 2024 (11 comments) New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858024 - Oct 2024 (120 comments)
- dang 2y agoWe changed the url above from https://www.popsci.com/science/largest-prime-number/ https://www.popsci.com/science/largest-prime-number/ to the article it points to.
- neonate 2y agohttps://archive.ph/2XAbZ https://archive.ph/2XAbZ
- kevmo314 2y ago> Durant, who made his money off the boom, said he put his time and money into the project to show people that they aren’t helpless to technology giants and that we can figure out massive problems if we work together. I can appreciate the sentiment but > The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money. doesn't really show me much especially since > The prime number Durant discovered serves no real purpose for society. This sort of shows the opposite: if it takes $2M to discover something that doesn't have a real purpose, yeah I definitely feel a bit helpless against tech giants trying to do anything that is marginally useful.
- dustfinger 2y agoHa, we both basically posted the same thing ( see above )!
- CoastalCoder 2y agoHeh, that's a prime example of a race condition.
- namanyayg 2y ago"prime" example, intended or accidental?
- dustfinger 2y ago> The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money. > Durant, who made his money off the boom, said he put his time and money into the project to show people that they aren’t helpless to technology giants and that we can figure out massive problems if we work together. If I sold absolutely everything I owned, I would not even have close to half of what it Durant invested in his pet project. While I like his intended sentiment, I can't help but notice the irony.
- gerdesj 2y ago"If I sold absolutely everything I owned" Quite. I get the point but why not volunteer (to do something) and really show your grit? Pissing around with M primes and trying to make a point is a bit wank as a stance from a multi-zillionaire. He isn't helpless (to technology giants and that we can figure out massive problems if we work together.) ... and that's lovely.
- oefrha 2y agoYeah I’m totally fine with him spending his money on whatever hobby he likes, but the message is just strange, this and the other message that “he wants [GPUs] to be used for research and discovery”. And donating the $3k prize money to his high school to advance math and science education after burning $2m… It’s obviously still a nice thing, but why would you even mention it… That said, maybe he felt pressured to give the reporter more than “I was just having fun”.
- mrbluecoat 2y ago> The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money. ... The prime number Durant discovered serves no real purpose for society. Not sure how to react to this.
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- erk__ 2y agoHe was also interviewed by Numberphile when it was first published. The interview was released in both a full and a cut version. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIWS5Jd3k5QHdc0kxwfnZMg https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIWS5Jd3k5QHdc0...
- sega_sai 2y agoI understand some negative comments here, that this was somewhat pointless waste of money. But I would argue that him spending 2M$ is in the same category of people spending money to do climb a mountain nobody did climb, or beat world circumnavigation record etc. I.e. this is a bit of hunt for glory. And in some sense it's not the worst one.
- yen223 2y ago> The discovery was the result of almost exactly one year of work and about $2 million of Durant’s own money 9 years ago I asked how much a Mersenne prime is worth to us. I guess we have an answer now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932238
- WanderPanda 2y agoThis sounds like the (debunked) labor theory of value :p
- NavinF 2y agoDoes it? "Things are worth what people are willing to spend to get them" is a truism in capitalism and in reality. I might be getting wooshed here.
- wodenokoto 2y agoIf I remember correctly, it is more an Austrian Economic thing than a capitalism thing, and the way I understood it, is that it is not the cost to create something that defines the value, but the price you can sell it at. E.g, the value of the compute used was 2 million (because Durant bought it), but the prime is worthless, because he can't sell it, or use it for producing any services he can sell. The point is, that just because something was expensive to make, doesn't mean it has a high value, and conversely (and most importantly) just because something was cheap to make, doesn't mean it isn't high value. In life, I find a good way to value items is not what it cost to acquire it, but what it will cost to replace.
- NavinF 2y agoThat's fair. I suspect that if we had an efficient market for prime numbers, a coalition would have paid ~$2M for someone to calculate this number. He can't sell it because he didn't bother to create a market for it. >In life, I find a good way to value items is not what it cost to acquire it, but what it will cost to replace. I completely agree with this.
- evilsaloon 2y ago> Durant, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, found the new prime number using only publicly available unused cloud storage space. > I was able to find this number that’s astonishingly large … but I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers. Did he do this by taking advantage of spot pricing? It isn't actually mentioned how he uses those leftovers in the article.
- NavinF 2y agoYikes! If so, he could have saved a lotta money by purchasing 4090s instead of spot pricing. Last time I did the math, break even between buying and renting was only 3 months. I wonder if the search took a lot longer than he anticipated
- nwiswell 2y agoOnce physical hardware is involved, the problem gets a lot more complicated. If you're talking about $2M worth of 4090s you have to concern yourself not only with putting them in hosts, but also with adequate space, power distribution, cooling, and networking. You have to figure out how to gracefully handle hardware failures. You have to install operating systems, or at least come up with some mechanism to deploy automatically. And you just straight up have to supply labor to get 1000+ of these things plugged in. All that before you can get even get to the "fun part". If you're a multi-millionaire you might be willing to just pay the spot price premium.
- NavinF 2y agoNaw the dude had a year. It's not that hard to pay 1 contractor $30/hr to set up PXE boot, assemble machines and GPUs, air handling units, GPUs, and electrical sub panels. I've done a similar "jack of all trades" job for a weed company in Oakland way back before I became a software engineer. 1000 GPUs only takes 2 weeks to deploy.
- tholman 2y agoFun hypothetical, or can someone solve? How long, would this regex prime check [1] (via hn 2009) take to run on this on todays average machine? Hitchhiker's Guide's Deep Thought "42" was 7.5 million years, just for a guide-post. - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707236
- chx 2y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/a/17189376/308851 https://stackoverflow.com/a/17189376/308851 claims it's O(N^2). 10^82 operations ... say you can run 10^10 iterations in a second which no current CPU is capable of but let's pretend, it's not like a factor of 10 or 100 will make a big difference given how this is like 10^54 times the age of universe. This algorithm is not practical.
- SushiHippie 2y agoIsn't it basically this algorithm + overhead from using strings/regex? def is_prime(n): if n < 2: return False for i in range(2, int(n ** 0.5) + 1): if n%i==0: return False return True Haven't tested this, just quickly jotted it down in the HackerNews textarea, but theoretically it should be python code, which checks if n is divisible by any number between 2 and sqrt(n). And wouldn't this algorithm be just O(n), what does the regex engine do differently (except the string overhead)?
- chx 2y agoFine. It's now only 10^10 times the age of the universe. much better.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoHere N should be interpreted as the number itself, not the number of digits (in any base). So the actual complexity is exponential in terms of the number of digits and in fact it will take about 10^(10^8) times the age of universe to build the string alone.
- carparking5 2y ago[flagged]
- wodenokoto 2y agoMy understanding is that he used to be an engineer at NVIDIA. And while I know salaries can be quite high in the US, I didn't realize they where high enough to let you spend $2 million for a 1 year hobby project.
- xmprt 2y agoThis is an outlier. I met someone who was a millionaire working at Nvidia in 2018. That's not that uncommon working in tech. The stock has gone up about 30x since then. He's probably worth at least 20M if not more now. That's definitely an outlier.
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- 01100011 2y agoLuke didn't just work at NVIDIA. He spent over ten years there and was, for a while, one of the CUDA architects.
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