|
|
Article: Chief of the code-crackers Ronald Rivest rounds up thousands of computers to make world a safer place
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- April 25, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1994 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
|
CAMBRIDGE -- For the past eight months, several thousand computers
(not people, just their computers) have been simultaneously solving
the answer to this rather obscure question:
What two prime numbers (numbers that can only be divided by
themselves, or by 1) when multiplied together give the product
number:
114,381,625,757,888,867,669,235,779,976,146,612,010,218,296,721,242,3
62,562,561,842,935,706,935,245,733,897,830,597,123,563,958,705,058,98
9,075,147,599,290,026,879,543,541?
Watch your Internet usenet bulletin board (sci.crypt or
alt.hackers) for the answer, which will be posted tomorrow.
The casual reader is probably not surprised that it's hard to do.
Or that the challenge was ...