RogerBW's Blog

The Weekly Challenge 168: At Home with the Perrins 09 June 2022

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved more furkling about with prime numbers. (Note that this is open until 12 June 2022.)

Task 1: Perrin Prime

The Perrin sequence is defined to start with [3, 0, 2]; after that, term N is the sum of terms N-2 and N-3. (So it continues 3, 2, 5, 5, 7, ….)

A Perrin prime is a number in the Perrin sequence which is also a prime number.

Calculate the first 13 Perrin Primes.

Perrin pseudo-primes have some interesting properties, but take a while to find – and Perl's Math::Prime::Util already has optimised code for finding them. Which is why I proposed this one instead.

There are various fiddly ways of generating arbitrary terms in the sequence, but since I want the whole sequence anyway I don't bother. The output numbers won't be in order and may have duplicates, so I store the results in a set. Ruby:

def perrinprime(n)
  out = Set.new
  seq = [3, 0, 2]
  while true do

Roll the sequence.

    seq.push(seq[0] + seq[1])
    seq.shift

Prime-test and store.

    if seq[-1].prime? then
      out.add(seq[-1])
      if out.length >= n then
        break
      end
    end
  end
  return out.to_a.sort
end

(For other languages I have a primality tester from earlier challenges.)

Task 2:

You are given an integer greater than 1.

Write a script to find the home prime of the given number.

The home prime HP(n) of an integer n greater than 1 is the prime number obtained by repeatedly factoring the increasing concatenation of prime factors including repetitions.

In other words, to calculate HP(10) we run through:

primefactors(10) = (2, 5) → 25
primefactors(25) = (5, 5) → 55
primefactors(55) = (5, 11) → 511
primefactors(511) = (7, 73) → 773
primefactors(773) = (773)

(If I wanted a whole sequence of these, I'd build up a map as I did in task 164.2 "Happy Numbers" – all of these numbers (10, 25, 55, 511, 773) would have the same home prime of 773.)

I already have prime factorisation code from earlier challenges, so I'll re-use that. Raku:

sub homeprime($n0) {
    my $n = $n0;
    while (True) {

Get the prime factors.

        my $t = primefactor($n);

If there was only one prime factor and its exponent is 1, the result is prime; exit.

        if ($t.elems == 1 && $t.values.max() == 1) {
            last;
        }

Otherwise, build up a string concatenation of the prime factors.

        my $ns = '';
        for ($t.keys.sort({ $^a <=> $^b })) -> $d {
            for (1..$t{$d}) {
                $ns ~= $d;
            }
        }

And convert it back into a number. (Other languages get this done explicitly; in Raku, Perl and Lua they just sort of slurp across as needed.)

        $n = 0 + $ns;
    }
    return $n;
}

Full code on github.

See also:
The Weekly Challenge 164: Happy Palindromes

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