This is a very simple program to create images with an Ulam Spiral on it. The output of the program with a image dimension of 500 will be the following:
In this case the prime numbers are highlighted in green color. As you see, the mysterious (or maybe not so) diagonals are shown, indicating that there could be a pattern in the prime number distribution.
If you don't know who is Stanislaw Ulam and what he discovered, or you want to know more about the Ulam Spiral, here are some links:
You first need to have Go properly installed.
Ensure that your GOPATH/bin is added to your PATH environment variable.
After that you can "go get" the project easily with:
go get github.com/kloster/ulam
To generate an Ulam spiral image with default values you can just call
ulam
This will generate a 100 x 100 image in the current working directory with the name UlamSpiral.bmp
You can specify the dimensions and/or the name of the image in this way:
ulam -dim=2000 ~/Images/SuperUlamSpiral.bmp
The algorithm to check if a number is prime or not is under the prime package.
It uses the best simple algorithm as shown in Wikipedia - Primality test
Well, I like the kind of mystery around the prime numbers and I am liking a lot the Go programing language a lot, so I decided to start learning the image processing in Go with this tiny program.
If I find the time, I will try to play a little more with other kind of prime numbers graphical representations...
Who knows, maybe the formula to get Prime numbers is about to be discovered! (Well, in that case we should not be that happy. The Internet security would explode!)
- Improve the UlamSpiral algorithm
- Add concurrency