Primer
Primer is a pattern that was constructed by Dean Hickerson on November 1, 1991 that produces a stream of lightweight spaceships representing prime numbers. N is prime if and only if a lightweight spaceship escapes to the left of the pentadecathlon at the bottom-left corner of the pattern at generation 120N+100.[1][2] It was the first pattern created that computes prime numbers, though others have since been constructed using the same ideas (see glider gunless primer).
Primer | |||||||
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Pattern type | Miscellaneous | ||||||
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Number of cells | 2953 | ||||||
Bounding box | 440×294 | ||||||
Discovered by | Dean Hickerson | ||||||
Year of discovery | 1991 | ||||||
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It works by using gliders to emulate a prime number sieve. Lightweight spaceships that move westward are deleted by gliders that represent positive integers if the lightweight spaceship represents a multiple of that number.
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Videos
gollark: This is mostly just because of NIm's very immature libraries.
gollark: Weird.
gollark: I don't mean I found that and ignored it, I mean I never noticed such a thing occurring.
gollark: The redis session thing uses the random session ID generator.
gollark: I ignored that because the minoteaur session storage thing just generates 64-bit snowflakes for session IDs, which is probably not a horrible security risk much.
References
- PRIMES.LIF from Alan Hensel's lifep.zip pattern collection. Accessed on July 28, 2009.
- four-primers.rle.gz from Golly's built-in pattern catalogue. Accessed on July 28, 2009.
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