On 16 November 2010 09:43, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tuesday, November 16, 2010, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >> On 16 November 2010 06:57, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It is completely clear from the documentation above Mathematica *only* uses >>> a pseudo prime test. It says right there "gives a pseudorandom prime number >>> in the range". >>> William >> >> I was interpreting that as a prime generated by a pseudo random number >> generator, whereas you are interpreting it as a random pseudoprime. > > Mathematica's documentation is misleading. You previously wrote it was "completely clear" ! > Eg, how would you > interpret the docs for PrimeQ? > http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/PrimeQ.html I would interpret that as Mathematica's PrimeQ[] tests with 100% certainty if the number is prime or not. But I somehow expect as a number theorist you are going to tell me that there's no publicly known algorithm to 100% prove a number is prime at the speed Mathematica does - i.e. Mathematica's test is almost certainly a probabilistic test, which has a finite chance of being wrong. Perhaps some of these issues should be raised with Wolfram Research. it would be good to sort out the issues I found at #10112, where I found by some brute-force testing that pseudo_prime() hangs if fed silly input values, rather than reporting they are silly. Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
