Thread: help, trying to find prime number

Yeah, I printf() them. Without printing it's 1.8 secs. I have looked into wikipedia on Trial division - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is that the algorithm you use? That is just the "brute force" one right? Then what is perfect to it?

Originally Posted by Ideswa

I have looked into wikipedia on Trial division - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is that the algorithm you use?

Yes, which is pretty much the same as what you used. I call it "perfect" because it only uses primes as trial divisors.

The sieve of Eratosthenes is likely to be much faster and yet feasible in this case of just finding the primes less than one million.

The sieve is memory-heavy though?
So you store primes in an array or something and when you check integer 'n' for primality you check if 'n mod x' != 0 where x are only primes you calculated before?

Edit: I now store validated primes in an array and only use the modulus with the primes in that array. Time without printf() now is 0.7 secs for integers up to 1 million.

Originally Posted by Ideswa

The sieve is memory-heavy though?

Assuming CHAR_BIT is 8, you could store a million bits in 125000 bytes. But even if you use ints instead (bools would be most natural option), that would still be less than sizeof(int) megabytes of memory needed, which should fit on the stack too.

Originally Posted by Ideswa

So you store primes in an array or something and when you check integer 'n' for primality you check if 'n mod x' != 0 where x are only primes you calculated before?

Yes, up to the square root of the candidate number.