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by tchitra 2963 days ago
This seems extremely contrived and at best misleading, if it is meant to be more than an exercise to teach someone to code. If there were a function that could produce subsets of primes in a sequence via a C-infinity function (as you are doing via your trained neural net), then it is extremely, extremely unlikely that all of the known pseudo-randomness properties of prime numbers and their k-point functions are true. In some ways, this would be a sort of converse to the Green-Tao theorem --- one can 'easily' produce subsets of primes contained in arithmetic or geometric sequences. Can you provide a better justification for this project? I tend to find 'approximating primes via neural networks' as a silly combination of buzzwords that ignores all of the known facts about primes. At best, this project appears to perform a numerical experiment of the claim,

"For all epsilon > 0, there exists an easy to compute C-infinity function (that can depend on epsilon) that can take an arithmetic/geometric/arithmetico-geometric sequence and produce, with high probability, a subset of primes of this sequence whose volume relative to all primes in this sequence is at least 1 - epsilon"

Why should one believe that this is true?

2 comments

I agree this approach is unlikely to be fruitful. I think the author doesn’t realize how frequent primes are (for example, primes are a lot denser than square numbers).

If you do the minimal to avoid obvious non-primes, avoiding numbers divisible by 2 or 5, you can expect to find a N-digit prime checking about N random N-digit numbers (1), so finding a 4,000-digit one after experimenting for a while doesn’t indicate ability to find primes.

(1) the density of primes around 10ⁿ is about 1/ln(10ⁿ), so you expect to find a prime after ln(10ⁿ) random samples, and

  ln(10ⁿ) = n * ln(10) ≈ 2.3 * n
Avoiding even numbers and multiples of five gives you back a factor of 2.5, more than offsetting that factor of ln(10)
The author is 16 and does not ask for quarter. This post is not going to set the world on light but it is a damn good effort.

"If you do the minimal to avoid obvious non-primes" - I take it that is the prompt for "I'm having a laugh" (rofl, lol etc)

This is from a 16 year old (I trust your homework was at least as good at that age)...
I completely missed that this person is 16. This is really impressive.