Just the other day I came across an article about prime numbers. It's called Fun with prime numbers. I though it was quite neat. Of course when your talking about prime numbers, the obvious next topic is Cryptography. Since the "Fun with prime numbers" page is about generating prime numbers, why not use this knowledge to crack some encryption code. What did Wikipedia have to say about this?. A fair bit.
RSA is the most common type of encryption around. People are constantly trying to break RSA keys for both fun and profit. The RSA people have a bounty to try and factor very large numbers. It's called The RSA Factoring Challenge. The next available bounty is $30,000. The challenge is to find the only two factors of this number:
74037563479561712828046796097429573142593188889231289084936232638972765034028266276 \
89199641962511784399589433050212758537011896809828673317327310893090055250511687706 \
3299072396380786710086096962537934650563796359
Ryan and I figured since we have so many library computers out there that sit there and do nothing all night, we could put them to good use. Ryan is a big fan of "brute force". How long would it take to find a factor? Well, I did a little test. After 15 hours, I tested 43 billion possibilities. It sounds like a lot. How long would it take to find the number at that rate?
More to come...