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o(1) statistical prime approximation
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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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
Because only 5% of those numbers are prime
That's the joke. Stochastic means probabilistic. And this "algorithm" gives the correct answer for the vast majority of inputs