- You must submit your entry by September 2, 2010, 23:59 (sorry, I can't wait until 2011, the next prime year)
- Your submission must be a sequence of decimal digits.
- The number that these represent must be prime (which make up (in order) a prime number. You may use a test like Rabin-Miller, which will be the method used to validate the submission. Note that it is therefore possible for the submission to fail such a test, even if it passed for the sumitter.
- The number must be composed of at least either 155 decimal digits or 512 bits (either will do).
- The winner will be the number which has the highest ratio of any one digit. For example, "23" has a 50% ratio of the digit "2" while 1011 has a 75% ratio of "1"
- You must send your entries to essay-contest@ajs.com
1074934746 0579280428 5352135601 3625508347 1908730962 4560090445 3404800574 5211453514 0988380000 3920392507 2147060801 0391490408 0059833120 1609426475 4887127734 07857
which has 31 zeros for a ratio of 20%. Obviously, your submission should seek to beat at least this relatively low number.
You can submit as many times as you like, but in order to avoid making me unhappy with you, I suggest waiting until the last minute (or whenever you decide to stop searching) and submit the best result you have by then.
The winner will get a lifetime subscription to this blog and their name prominently featured in the article in which the number is published.
For fun, I'll be writing my own solver in Rakudo Star Perl 6. It won't be very efficient, so I expect it to get seriously trounced, but I'll do it for the fun. Even if I find the best number, I'll publish the best submission from someone else.
> 1011 has a 33.3% ratio of "1"
ReplyDeleteShouldn't this be 75% ratio? Or am I misunderstanding the definition of ratio here?
Two things: 1) Sundar, yes that was a typo. I've fixed it. 2) Someone pointed out that there are public databases of large, interesting primes, one of which is all 1s. I'm still interested in seeing what people come up with. A program that comes up with interesting solutions (or even that solution) would be great.
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