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A classic example of a decidable decision problem is the set of prime numbers. It is possible to effectively decide whether a given natural number is prime by testing every possible nontrivial factor. Although much more efficient methods of primality testing are known, the existence of any effective method is enough to establish decidability.
The multiples of a given prime are generated as a sequence of numbers starting from that prime, with constant difference between them that is equal to that prime. [1] This is the sieve's key distinction from using trial division to sequentially test each candidate number for divisibility by each prime. [ 2 ]
For example, among the numbers 1 through 6, the numbers 2, 3, and 5 are the prime numbers, [6] as there are no other numbers that divide them evenly (without a remainder). 1 is not prime, as it is specifically excluded in the definition. 4 = 2 × 2 and 6 = 2 × 3 are both composite.
However, it does not contain all the prime numbers, since the terms gcd(n + 1, a n) are always odd and so never equal to 2. 587 is the smallest prime (other than 2) not appearing in the first 10,000 outcomes that are different from 1. Nevertheless, in the same paper it was conjectured to contain all odd primes, even though it is rather inefficient.
A prime sieve works by creating a list of all integers up to a desired limit and progressively removing composite numbers (which it directly generates) until only primes are left. This is the most efficient way to obtain a large range of primes; however, to find individual primes, direct primality tests are more efficient [ citation needed ] .
A primality test is an algorithm for determining whether an input number is prime.Among other fields of mathematics, it is used for cryptography.Unlike integer factorization, primality tests do not generally give prime factors, only stating whether the input number is prime or not.
For example, among the positive integers of at most 1000 digits, about one in 2300 is prime (log(10 1000) ≈ 2302.6), whereas among positive integers of at most 2000 digits, about one in 4600 is prime (log(10 2000) ≈ 4605.2). In other words, the average gap between consecutive prime numbers among the first N integers is roughly log(N). [3]
A prime number (or prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. By Euclid's theorem, there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Subsets of the prime numbers may be generated with various formulas for primes.