I started reading The Curious Incient of the Dog in the Night-Time today.
It includes the following quote:
"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
I found that really beautiful and kinda moving, and so prime numbers were on my mind tonight when I was otherwise bored and had free time on my hands. So I did this.
It does not propose to search for a pattern.. only determines the set. I'm sure others have done this, and I suspect far more gracefully than I have. But whatever. It was just supposed to be fun.
As it is currently written, these are the approximate runtimes on my Macbook Pro, utilizing only a single 2.7GHz i7 CPU:
| range | runtime |
|---|---|
| 1 - 100 | 0.001384 seconds |
| 1 - 1,000 | 0.003717 seconds |
| 1 - 10,000 | 0.123570 seconds |
| 1 - 100,000 | 4.932996 seconds |
| 1 - 1,000,000 | 363.863991 seconds (~6 minutes) |
| 1 - 10,000,000 | 21143.8235 seconds (~352.4 minutes; ~5.9 hours) |
I'm thinking this might be a nice opportunity for me to learn about threading/parallelization. Maybe for v2. But I've had enough fun for one night.