Re: As the Crow flies.

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:27:34 -0500, Mark VandeWettering
<wettering@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2008-10-16, \(M)-adman <grat@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mark VandeWettering wrote:
On 2008-10-15, spintronic <spintronic@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 15, 9:25 pm, Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 15, 3:14 pm, spintronic <spintro...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:




Are you afraid that after calling my program, a basic jumbled
garbled *** up.
You can't comprehend how it calculates \pi(x)?

If you had advanced the field at all, there's very little chance I
could understand what you do. The most recent advances -- certainly
since 1985 -- have involved grad-level mathematics. I'm a systems
guy. What I'm good at is seeing whether or not the code runs faster.
Yours doesn't,

Thats the fun bit don't you think? A slow code that is still faster
than all
modern \pi(x) functions.

Computing pi(x) has a long, illustrious history.

Longer then you could posibility know without the help of wikipedia.
So STFU

Mathematics is a bit of a hobby of mine, and number theory, while hardly
an area in which I would claim any real expertise, is certainly a topic
for which I have some experience and a fairly large number of reference
books. I'm also a bit of a fan of D. H. Lehmer, mostly for his work in
prime factorization, especially because of his work in early computing
devices, such as his mechanical factoring machine built from bicycle chains.
I did of course consult a reference, but it wasn't wikipedia, but rather
Crandall and Pomerance's book on prime numbers. I have a copy sitting on
my shelf for light reading when I am bored.

But my credentials aren't in question here. I didn't make any claims.
It's not hard to write a program which is fast if you aren't constrained
to actually having it give the right answers. But in mathematics, getting
the right answer is still relatively important.


Absolutely. On a scale of one to ten, getting the right answer would
be considered well above five or six ;-)

I present here a function to calculate the number of primes less than
N. It is blazingly fast,, O(1) as a matter of fact, no matter how
large N might be. It does suffer from the slight problem of not
returning the correct answer, but that doesn't really matter, does it?

int NumberOfPrimesLessThanN(int n)
{
return 1;
}

.

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