Re:A New Largest-Known Prime Number
by ryacko on Friday December 21, 2018 @09:05PM
(#18738429)
Possibly the only civilian use of quantum computing, an interesting decade is ahead.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Primality testing is actually much easier than integer factorization thanks to Fermat's "little" theorem. Methods based on this theorem, including the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne primes, can identify prime numbers on classical computers in polynomial time. However, factorization is not possible with this method.