Allen Poapst wrote:

>If so, I have found a formula for the prime sequence which I am trying to 
>get published through the university I am attending. Yes I know this is a 
>hotmail account and an informal letter, but it is just for inquiry purposes.
>
>Though the formula I have works in the following manner:
>
>f(x) = x....
>
>x      f(x)
>2      1
>3      2
>5      3
>7      4
>11    5
>13    6
>.      .
>.      .
>.      .
>200,000,093 ->  11,078,945th prime   (using my program that simulates my 
>formula, this calculation on my notebook takes 11 seconds)
>
>etc... until infinite, although I have only tested my formula to 
>approximately 5 million, using a computer simulation, the logic of the 
>formula makes sense for all numbers, since I found a pattern that my formula 
>exploits. So if you give a prime number into my formula, it will pop out 
>where it is in the prime sequence, though I have not found a formula that 
>works the other way around, where you give the position in the sequence and 
>the formula pops out the prime number.
>


you sent your message to a email list, rather than an individual...

the GIMPS project is searching for very(!) large prime numbers, the 
latest one they found is 2^^32582657 -1, which is 9.8 million decimal 
digits long.   Details on this project are here, http://mersenne.org/

a decimal representation of this number is here -> 
http://www.mersenne.org/prime10.txt (note this is a ~ 10 megabyte file, 
it will take a while to download)

if you could plug that into your formula, you say it would tell us which 
prime number it is ?   You might have difficulty with the size of the 
numbers, traditional techniques for multiprecision arithmetic tend to 
break down when you're dealing with 4 megabyte wide numbers.

BTW, the US$100,000 prize money was put up by the EFF (Electronic 
Frontiers Foundation), and its for discovering the first prime number 
over 10 million digits long.  See http://www.eff.org/awards/coop.php
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