Hacker News Reader

I don't know what you mean by that, but for an example, 16=2^4 and is therefore arranged as a grid, whereas 17 is prime, and must therefore be arranged as 17 dots on a circle.

View on HN

The primes are some of the worst offenders, eg the transition from 647 (prime) to 648 (3×3×3×3×2×2×2), but as we approach infinity, the visualizations increasingly appear circular, and it's the least-primey (?) that break from the trend.

eg 854-856, & 857 (prime) are all virtually or perfectly circular. Or maybe I'm observing not mathematical but neuro-visual principles.

Neuro-visual I think. Hard to see 100s of dots in a circle as not a circle.

The same principle is why this looks like a circle/ellipse but it isn't:

O

Still, there's something to be said for the variance in the number of prime factors.

https://quickchart.io/sandbox/#%7B%22chart%22%3A%22%7B%5Cn%2...

Most large numbers are divisible by some large prime; so suppose that a number is divisible by some large number 11. Then what appears on your screen is some pattern repeated at least 11 times arranged into a circle, because the "largest" pattern is that of the largest prime in the factorization. The numbers that can be factored into primes at most, say, 5 are comparatively very rare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com