JustARegularNerd comments on o(1) statistical prime approximation

[–] JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I'm struggling to follow the code here. I'm guessing it's C++ (which I'm very unfamiliar with)

bool is_prime(int x) {
    return false;
}

Wouldn't this just always return false regardless of x (which I presume is half the joke)? Why is it that when it's tested up to 99999, it has a roughly 95% success rate then?

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[–] kraftpudding@lemmy.world 35 points 6 months ago (1 child)

I suppose because about 5% of numbers are actually prime numbers, so false is not the output an algorithm checking for prime numbers should return

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[–] JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 6 months ago (1 child)

Oh I'm with you, the tests are precalculated and expect a true to return on something like 99991, this function as expected returns false, which throws the test into a fail.

Thank you for that explanation

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[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

And the natural distribution of primes gets smaller as integer length increases

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