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Amateur Quest For Lychrel Numbers

Posted by timothy on 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."

1 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All the apathy here... by protonman · · Score: 1, Troll

    > Am I supposed to be rainman or something?

    Yeah, definitely, yeah.

    --
    The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.