Google prime number problem
Posted in Programming by sandaruwan on December 19th, 2006Few years ago google placed a bill board in Silicon Valley (Well, I haven’t seen that but read the googleblog post). The board was about a small programming problem.
Somehow, that blog post became one of the top stories in digg recently; after seen it, I decided to give it a try. I just used the straight forward brute force method and it was surprisingly easy. It was just like a old days doing an IOI code, and more to the point, runtime doesn’t matter, memory limits doesn’t matter, and coding time doesn’t matter, so, what make it an IOI code is that code quality also doesn’t matter.
I just code like I always did… just coded… coded… coded… never bothered about the coding standards… and finally two small programs (e.zip). First I generated factorials up to 100, divide 1 by all those and saved the result (upto 500 decimal places) in a file. Then from the next program I added all those things together and checked for a prime. Pretty simple. The answer was 7427466391
