Comments on Bill the Lizard: SICP Exercise 1.28: The Miller-Rabin test

Ramakrishnan VU3RDD, Yes, it absolutely would retu...

2010-04-25T15:22:16.912-04:00

Ramakrishnan VU3RDD,
Yes, it absolutely would return a false positive in that case. To see it fail, just replace the call to the random number generator in last line of the code listing with the value 1:

(try-it 1))

I've fixed the code listing so it now generates random numbers in the range 2 to (n-1).

Nice catch, and thanks a lot for reading!

Thanks for the nice discussions on sicp. I am also...

2010-04-25T11:25:57.851-04:00

Thanks for the nice discussions on sicp. I am also working through the book and it is very informative to look at the way others have done the exercises.

If the rand-integer generates 0, then base becomes 1. In that case, wouldn't the algorithm give false positive?

Thanks Yonatan, I took your suggestion and added t...

2010-04-07T17:52:55.211-04:00

Thanks Yonatan, I took your suggestion and added the new version of fast-prime? to this post.

Thanks also for telling me about your class. It's good to hear that someone is getting some use out of these notes. I've been pretty busy with a new job, but I'm almost done with my notes for the next lecture and section of the text. I should have those posted soon, and some new exercise solutions to follow.

BTW, I'm taking a Computer Science course that...

2010-04-06T13:38:06.267-04:00

BTW, I'm taking a Computer Science course that's based on SICP this semester, and your notes are really helpful for me. Keep up the good work and thanks. :)

Hi Bill, It seems like your miller-rabin-test imp...

2010-04-06T13:34:22.961-04:00

Hi Bill,

It seems like your miller-rabin-test implementation only tests a single random integer. On SICP, when they implemented the fermat-test, they also made the wrapping (fast-prime?) procedure that runs the fermat-test numerous times on random integers.

I think you should add a similar procedure to the post.

Thank you very much! also for the SO internal cont...

2010-03-06T08:51:20.855-05:00

Thank you very much! also for the SO internal contact method.

kami, I went ahead and deleted it for you. I'...

2010-03-06T08:40:28.801-05:00

kami,
I went ahead and deleted it for you. I'm a moderator on Stack Overflow, so you can click the "flag" link below the tags, then select "Requires moderator attention" from the list that appears whenever a question or answer on that site needs special attention.

hi bill, i am a Stack Overflow user, i tried to en...

2010-03-06T05:01:06.598-05:00

hi bill, i am a Stack Overflow user, i tried to end one of my questions but no luck, i saw you are the last editer on that question, could you tell me how to do it? the question link is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2208122/how-to-draw-a-groove-line-use-ps-it-seems-too-basic-that-no-tutorial-on-google