The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36 • Hacker News Board

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#21

Post by kanny96 » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 11:14 AM UTC

One-third of the prime words are past participles

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | wc

      2560    2560   21156

  [~/misc]$ cat primeWords.txt | tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n" | uniq | grep "ED$" | wc

       843     843    7594

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#22

Post by ubernostrum » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 12:17 PM UTC

yuan wrote: post #18

ralphb wrote: post #10

My personal favourite: PRIMETEST But the list is surprisingly long, so not that surpring that something concerning primes would be in there.

More interesting is what isn't there: so prime is not prime.

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#23

Post by CGamesPlay » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 12:51 PM UTC

Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#24

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 2:37 PM UTC

bryanl wrote: post #2

One of the words is halloween. How fitting.

[deleted]

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#25

Post by Hexstream » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 3:09 PM UTC

Xichekolas wrote: post #12

It seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.

And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#26

Post by zzkt » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 3:18 PM UTC

syoutsey wrote: post #3

I'm a little confused...why did he use base 36 instead of base 26? Aren't there only 26 letters we need to convert to numbers?

by convention in base 36, numbers can be represented by [0-9] and [a-z]. 1(36)=1(10) a(36)=10(10) and z(36)=36(10).

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#27

Post by graywh » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 3:23 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #23

Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.

Then you'd just sort by length, too.

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#28

Post by yan » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 3:28 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #23

Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.

Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#29

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 4:20 PM UTC

Hexstream wrote: post #25

Xichekolas wrote: post #12

It seems fitting that 'zen' is prime.

And yet I doubt you'd have noticed that zen wasn't prime if it hadn't been.

[deleted]

Re: The Prime Lexicon: A list of English words that are prime in base 36

#30

Post by harpastum » Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 6:06 PM UTC

yan wrote: post #28

CGamesPlay wrote: post #23

Since this is a clearly meaningless list, it doesn't really need to be sorted alphabetically. I think it would have been more fitting to sort the list numerically.

Won't numerically and alphabetically in this case be almost identical?

Kinda, but not really. What you'd end up with is alphabetical sublists organized by length—any word with 4 letters is greater than any word with 3 letters (like in base ten, where any 4-digit number is greater than any 3-digit number).