[TriLUG] Prime number discovery?

[Benjamin Reed]

On Mon, 2002-08-12 at 10:45, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> 
> I heard "through the grapevine" about a new discovery related to prime
> numbers made by Indian mathematicians.  If what is said is true -- that
> the amount of time do determine if a number is prime has been "drastically
> reduced" -- this could have grave implications on public/private key
> cryptography.  This class of cryptography depends on the fact that the
> prime number problem is computationally very difficult; a new method to
> find primes could undercut huge amounts of investment in cryptography.

From what I've read, the algorithm drastically reduces that computation,
but does not reduce the time it takes to *factor* numbers made from
large primes, so i shouldn't affect strong crypto.

I'm no mathematician though, so I don't know many specifics.

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger@befunk.com)
http://defiance.dyndns.org/ / http://radio.scenespot.org/
...if humanoids eat chicken, then obviously they'd eat their own
species.  Otherwise they'd just be picking on the chickens. -- Kryten