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Today’s Praxis is on the Goldbach Conjecture which states that any even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. The challenge is to write a program that will take in an even number, and spit out the two primes that can be added together to make it.

I realize my solution is extremely naive, but it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve actually worked on programming problems other than “get data from database a, transform it somehow, and put it in database b.” Also, for extra difficulty (and speed, although my algorithm is the real speed hangup in this case) I wrote it in C.

For the one or two people still reading, here is my extremely naive solution, cobbled together while watching West Side Story on TCM.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void show_usage();
unsigned long *create_sieve_to_number(unsigned long number);

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {

    if (argc != 2) {
		show_usage();
		return -1;
	}

	unsigned long number = atol(argv[1]);

	if ((number % 2) != 0) {
		show_usage();
		return -1;
	}

	unsigned long *sieve = create_sieve_to_number(number);

	for (unsigned long i = 2; i < number; i++) {
		if (sieve[i] == 1) {
			for (unsigned long j = i; j < number; j++) {
				if (sieve[j] == 1) {
					if (i + j == number) {
						printf("Solution found: %d + %d\n", i, j);
						return 0;
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}

	printf("no solution found!  pick up your Fields Medal!\n");

	return 0;

}

void show_usage(void) {
	printf("usage: goldbach [even number]\n");
}

unsigned long *create_sieve_to_number(unsigned long number) {
	unsigned long *sieve;

	sieve = (unsigned long *)malloc(sizeof(unsigned long) * (number + 1));

	for (int i = 0; i < number; i++) {
		sieve[i] = 1;
	}

	for (unsigned long i = 2; i < number; i++) {
		if (sieve[i] == 1) {
			for (unsigned long j = i * i; j < number; j = j + i) {
				sieve[j] = 0;
			}
		}
	}

	return sieve;
}

Edit: See what happens when you’re watching TV when you’re doing your homework? The flags marking numbers as prime can be a bool (or even a bit) and most certainly does not have to be an unsigned long. Yay for massive, massive wastes of memory! (But hey, I was watching West Side Story…)