OT-Governor General binary

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 07:33:15PM -0400, Mel Wilson wrote:
> On 10-10-04 06:33 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
>
>> That seems to confirm that the value is a prime number, and I do not
>> imagine they picked a palindromic prime number "just because it looks
>> good."  They aren't *that* common.
>
> There seem to be 2972 33-bit palindromic primes.

Out of 4 billion 33-bit numbers.  Now how many 33-bit numbers are
palindromic?  The first digit has to be a one, then pick a random 16bits
to follow, and the last 16 bits are determined by the first 16 bits,
so 65536 of them.

So it seems that if they picked a 33-bit palindrome, they had a 2972/65536
change to get a prime one.  5% or so is a pretty good chance of doing
that by accident.

Of course wanting something with a fairly even distribution of 0s and
1s probably changes the probability as well.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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