On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Jack Diederich <jackd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you use an off-the-shelf prime number generator fucntion[1] that > returns consecutive primes the method collapses into a simple > function. > > def nPrime(n, primes=[], next_prime=eratosthenes().next): > while len(primes) < n: > primes.append(next_prime()) > return primes[n] > > -Jack > > [1] > http://www.catonmat.net/blog/solving-google-treasure-hunt-prime-number-problem-four/#comment-3075 > There is a deque implementation that is faster still but I can't > find a link. Jack, thanks for the link, I'll definitely look into it. The function is currently implemented in a class I wrote myself, which is a generator class that does exactly the same thing in the next() function. I didn't post the code here because it wasn't in the scope of this thread, but I'm sure others have done a lot better and much more efficient algorithms. The nPrime method uses the nature of the iteration and checks if a value already exists (ie generated before) and return that value; otherwise it iterates again. This way, I don't have to iterate from n=2 and on every time, which makes generation time linear. However, I just gave the link's code a quick try. It was at least 10x times faster than my code to generate 100000 prime numbers - I'll have a closer look. Thanks a great deal. Ching-Yun "Xavier" Ho, Technical Artist Contact Information Mobile: (+61) 04 3335 4748 Skype ID: SpaXe85 Email: cont...@xavierho.com Website: http://xavierho.com/
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