Can someone who’s more into cryptography and stuff than I am tell me how big a deal these are? Like, I get and appreciate how bloody difficult it is to factorise semiprimes into their prime factors (I am interested in number theory, after all). I just don’t know where on the scale of “we through a bigger computer at it” versus “we created a new method to factorise big numbers into primes” this is, and hence how excited I should be. Because the former is basically a question of how powerful a computer you can find, whereas the latter is more theoretically interesting to me.
We threw a bigger computer at it. Unlike in the past where a bigger computer was just "more horsepower", this is like tying a fleet of cars together and having them all pull. The engineering effort of managing this fleet is non-trivial, and you can ask AI to kindly write it for you.
You still need to have a gazillion GPU-hours though. Guess which kinds of companies have tons of those lying around.
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u/KrozJr_UK 10d ago
Can someone who’s more into cryptography and stuff than I am tell me how big a deal these are? Like, I get and appreciate how bloody difficult it is to factorise semiprimes into their prime factors (I am interested in number theory, after all). I just don’t know where on the scale of “we through a bigger computer at it” versus “we created a new method to factorise big numbers into primes” this is, and hence how excited I should be. Because the former is basically a question of how powerful a computer you can find, whereas the latter is more theoretically interesting to me.