Prime numbers guru 'factors' down success

Ben Laurie ben at algroup.co.uk
Mon Jan 20 11:47:17 EST 2003


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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