Amateur Quest For Lychrel Numbers

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 18, 2002 @06:17AM from the martin-gardner-would-be-proud dept.

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."

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Re:In a nutshell.... by Andrew+Allan · 2002-08-18 06:45 · Score: 5, Funny

I've found another one!!!

Try doing it with 691! ;-)
Re:what? by norwoodites · 2002-08-18 06:48 · Score: 3, Funny

There is one misprint:
256 + 652 is not 908 but 808.
Proof for 196 by dave_mcmillen · 2002-08-18 06:55 · Score: 3, Funny

The number 196 NEVER becomes a palindrome, no matter how many iterations you do. I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the Post Comment box is too narrow to contain it.

(Apologies to Fermat.)
Re:In a nutshell.... by tesmako · 2002-08-18 08:50 · Score: 2, Funny

I hate you. I spent an hour writing a program to calculate these damn numbers and crunching on 691 before I got the joke :P Oh well, I learnt a bit of GMP in the process, guess it was not all wasted.