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
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com
More information about the cryptography
mailing list