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."

Comments

Re:what?

[cperciva]

256 + 652 = 908
908 + 809 = 1717
1717 + 7171 = 8888, which is a palindrome.

However,
196 + 691 = 887
887 + 788 = 1675
1675 + 5761 = 7436
7436 + 6347 = 13783
and contining on for a few million digits still doesn't end up at a palindrome.

Re:Simple Example

[cperciva]

I posted a story a week ago about the prime number problem being solved for the first time with a deterministic algorithm and it was rejected by /.

You aren't talking about this by any chance, are you?

It's not true, though.

[dark-nl]

879, 1997, and 7059 also have this property, whatever it is. The guy even explains this on his site. I wonder who he is, and why he doesn't put his name anywhere.