Talk:Lychrel number
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I will try and find evidence that the term 'Lychrel' is widely accepted.
Added the "196 palindrome quest". Should this be a separate article? Also did some general capitalisation fixes. --Bruce1ee (Talk) 12:12, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
- I think it should be. Note that Wade's page (http://www.p196.org) has a lot of information collaborated together, but neglects to mention the work done before 1,000,000 digits was reached. In terms of exponential increase in CPU power, the work done before, say to 77,000 digit, is just as important. (Likewise, work done fron 240,000,000 to 241,000,000 digits is NOT as important as the first million.) CPU and memory limitations have to be taken into account to properly understand this. Regardless, we needn't get into such details... it should just list everyone involved. Jason's site (http://www.jasondoucette.com) collaborates a lot of information found on the 'net regarding all work done prior to his 2 to 13 million digit work, including many sources prior to John Walker's first million digits. Please read over both of these sites during creation of such a page, if it is made. 137.186.22.225 01:06, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Links like: http://home.cfl.rr.com/p196/lychrel%20records.html do not work because Wade's page uses frames, and anything not loaded in a frame forwards to the main page. This makes links to the inside impossible, unfortunately. He should really update his site without frames. 137.186.22.225 01:06, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Proof not found
The text states "Vaughn Suite devised a program that only saves the first and last few digits of each iteration, enabling testing of the digit patterns in millions of iterations to be performed without having to save each entire iteration to a file [5]." Um... I think this is wrong. Saving the first and last digits only was a hunch that perhaps a pattern could be found from these digits, and it would be nice to have JUST these digits, and a lot of them (iterations, that is), rather than have all of the tons of digits inbetween that served no purpose for this particulat pattern searching idea. Vaughne made a program to do this. It had no effect on the algorithm for the 196 quest, or Most Delayed Palindromic Number quest, as far as I know. Please refer to that reference again, and if that reference is unclear, the author of the reference may have it wrong. 137.186.22.182 01:22, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Huh?
This article seems to show persistent confusion as to what exactly a Lychrel number is (probably because the principal reference at p196.com seems to have the same confusion). If a Lychrel number is defined as in the first sentence of this article, then no example of a Lychrel number is known. The "Proof not found" section is occasionally careful to note that 196 is only a "candidate Lychrel", but then also calls it a "seed Lychrel", which by definition is a Lychrel. And then "Benjamin Despres' program has identified all Lychrel seeds numbers of each digit length starting with 1-digit numbers up to and including all 16-digit numbers have been tested so far" - apart from making little grammatical sense, this sentence implies (actually it states directly) that Lychrel seeds are known. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the definition and exposition in the article say that no Lychrel number is known, and therefore no seed, no kin, and no thread Lychrel number is known. Like I said, this confusion exists throughout p196.com as far as I can tell.
I additionally don't like the tone of "it is not currently possible to prove that a number will never form a palindrome". Mathematicians would just say that no proof is known -- not that no proof is "currently possible", whatever that means. Staecker 17:58, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Other Bases
It's been proven that Lychrel numbers exist in other bases; 10110 in binary (22) has been proven to be Lychrel. Where would be a good place to add that?
Oops, forgot to timestamp. Ralphmerridew 13:22, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
