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Finding the First 10-digit Prime in Digits of e (2017)


a Billion) Digits of e (3 September 2017) Back in 2004, Google ran a recruitment campaign where they posted the following billboard along the main freeway running through Silicon Valley, and later at other locations in the country: For those who managed to find the answer, a second problem awaited on the secret web site, and those who solved that were then encouraged to send in a job application. Effectively nerd sniped, I started playing with this problem sometime last year, and it led down a path to some excellent programming exercises.

Back in 2004, Google ran a recruitment campaign where they posted the following billboard along the main freeway running through Silicon Valley, and later at other locations in the country: For those who managed to find the answer, a second problem awaited on the secret web site, and those who solved that were then encouraged to send in a job application. This post describes a few different ways of solving the problem; from a Perl one-liner, to using hand-rolled fixed-point arithmetic (including an implementation of Improved division by invariant integers) or using binary splitting with GMP to compute a billion decimals of e.

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