Fun with Numbers: The Pan-Prime-Digit Cube Hypothesis

[David Hayden]

The biginteger library that I was using was based on base 2 so at least half of the time in my program was spent computing the digits in a number. So I cobbled together an small infinite precision class in base 10. It only has to do addition, multiplication and comparison. The new code running in a single thread takes 4.004 seconds to find the solution we have so far.

I had a multi-threaded version but found that cygwin (a system that provides a unix-like environment under windows) doesn't properly support multiple threads. Once I get this multi-threaded it should run at least twice as fast on my 4-core system. I also hope to look at the math a little more and see if I can pull some further algorithmic tricks to speed it up more.