[12307] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Prime numbers guru 'factors' down success
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Mon Jan 20 11:50:50 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 16:47:17 +0000
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
To: William Knowles <erehwon@c4i.org>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
William Knowles wrote:
> Prime numbers (such as 1, 5, 11, 37...) are divisible only by
> themselves or 1. While smaller prime numbers are easy to make out, for
> very large numbers, there never had been a formula for "primality
> testing" until August 2002.
Doh! This is so untrue. The point is that they discovered a test that
wasn't NP, for the first time. OK, so its P but with a vast constant,
but even so, there must be a point at which it gets better than the best
NP methods. I wonder if anyone's worked out where that point is?
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
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