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I attended the event celebrating the solving of LCS35. LCS35 was a cryptographic challenge set by Ron Rivest (the R in RSA) in 1999. It was intended to be so difficult that only computers made 35 years in the future would be able to solve it.

The challenge was solved by Bernard Fabrot. It was fairly simple code on I believe an intel 4770K. The math libraries and CPU had been optimized so much in the ~20 years since the challenge was set that a consumer CPU could calculate the answer. The only catch is that it took months on end of calculation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCS35




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