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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."
196+691 = 887 (which is not a palindrome)
Apply the same for 887, 887+788 = 1675 (not a palindrome)
Apparently, you can go on forever like this without ever reaching a palindrome!
152, on the other hand, which I picked randomly, quickly reaches 707 which is a palindrome.
Personally, I don't find this interesting at all. 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 /. OOPS! Did I just go offtopic? Sorry, mods!!!
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What are some real-world applications that this process generates?
Maybe some psuedo-random number generation with the huge strings of numbers that this comes up with?
Any way that this could be used in some sort of encryption?
There HAS to be some useful purpose to this.. There must be, or it wouldn't be the way it is! *twitch, twitch*
-Matt