Turing and the Primes (2016) [pdf]

https://people.maths.bris.ac.uk/~maarb/papers/turingprimes.pdf

by pncnmnp • 2 years ago

25 4 2 years ago

people.maths.bris.ac.uk

srbhr• 2 years ago

Talking about primes,(2^136279841)-1 is the New Largest Known Prime Number. Discovered 21st Oct (Today).

Ref. https://www.mersenne.org/

256_• 2 years ago

I wonder what Turing would've made of that.

euroderf• 2 years ago

The world's greatest PRNG.

johnklos• 2 years ago

I can't think about the Pilot ACE without thinking about the not much later Jupiter Ace, which was named after the Pilot.

Interestingly, the first more challenging program I wrote as a child was a prime counting program. Although I wanted a Jupiter Ace because I wanted to learn Forth, instead I had a Sinclair ZX80 with 8K ROM (and later a T/S 1000). With the speed of Sinclair BASIC, it'd've taken multiple years to count the first million primes, something that I use as a benchmark these days and which takes less than a second on an Apple ARM CPU.

I remember collecting counts to compare ln(x) with pi(x) and imagining how wonderful it'd be to have powerful computers that could give me the answers I wanted in seconds and minutes instead of days, weeks, months or years. I like to imagine Turing had imagined the same thing now and then :)

Turing and the Primes (2016) [pdf]

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