Skip Navigation
Jump
It gets better the longer it runs
  • 99.5% would still be e^200 numbers checked (7x10^86). According to the Quora link in my other comment, we've only calculated primes in sequence up to 4x10^18 as of 7 years ago. 95% is very doable though.

    Edited to correct first N primes vs primes up to N.

    1
  • Jump
    It gets better the longer it runs
  • We got nerd sniped at almost the exact same time, but approached this in very different ways. I applaud your practical approach, but based on what I calculated, you should stop now. It will never reach 99.999%

    2
  • Jump
    It gets better the longer it runs
  • A few calculations:

    • There are 9592 prime numbers less than 100,000. Assuming the test suite only tests numbers 1-99999, the accuracy should actually be only 90.408%, not 95.121%
    • The 1 trillionth prime number is 29,996,224,275,833. This would mean even the first 29 trillion primes would only get you to 96.667% accuracy.
    • The density of primes can be approximated using the Prime Number Theorem: 1/ln(x). Solving 99.9995 = 100 - 100 / ln(x) for x gives e^200000 or 7.88 × 10^86858. In other words, the universe will end before any current computer could check that many numbers.
    37