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o(1) statistical prime approximation
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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I'm struggling to follow the code here. I'm guessing it's C++ (which I'm very unfamiliar with)
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?
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
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
And the natural distribution of primes gets smaller as integer length increases
That's the joke. Stochastic means probabilistic. And this "algorithm" gives the correct answer for the vast majority of inputs
Because only 5% of those numbers are prime