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Story Idea

This month's Scientific American has an article about autistic and developmentally disabled savants (sorry, that link goes to a "buy from the archive" thing, since they don't make their archives free. Not even to subscribers, as far as I can tell). The interesting thing that caught my eye was that these skills often can involve computation, including "an affinity for prime numbers". Of course, when you think of prime numbers you think of one thing, right? That's right - encryption. So what if there was a savant so gifted that they could crack most of today's prime-number based encryption schemes? That would be a very valuable resource for a lot of people.

Of course, that is as far as I got with the story idea. Which is why I am not actually a writer.