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Amateur Quest For Lychrel Numbers
Habberhead writes "Some people are aware of the quest for a palindromic solution for the number 196. Basically any number that doesn't form a palindrome by reversing and adding its digits is known as a Lychrel Number. (Sequence Number A023108 of Sloan's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) The number 196 happens to be the first of them. In over a year's worth of time, and more than 2 quadrillion calculations, this guy at www.p196.org has reversed and added the number over 100 MILLION times. His current answer is over 41 million digits long! Apparently he and a few others are also working on a distributed computing program for finding larger and larger Lychrel Numbers. It looks like they have in mind a Seti@Home style program with visible results."
I see a number of posts saying "So what?".
Let me explain this in laymen's terms: The geek who spent the past 8 years of his life crunching numbers has definately not gotten laid during that period. This is his day of glory, his existance peaks here.
He can then ride the wave of mathematical fame for about a week - but he can use it to score with the hottest of hotties. Chicks dig brains.
In terms of the actual experiment, the results will allow us to develop a kernel module which can predict how long it will be before you have sex. The more shell logins, complicated bash scripts and mount commands you use, the longer your wait until The Big Day.
So this is good for Linux.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to trust the intuition of an umemployed "not that great of a programmer" when it comes to number theory.
Stick to whining about being "mis-moderated".
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Go to hell, worthless slashdot troll.
Fuck you. No, really. Fuck yourself and drop dead. Am I supposed to be rainman or something?
I must have forgot how Pi devolves into a string of 20 "3" digits right after 3.14...