TL;DR

On with TASK #2 from The Weekly Challenge #177. Enjoy!

# The challenge

Write a script to generate first 20 Palindromic Prime Cyclops Numbers.

A cyclops number is a number with an odd number of digits that has a zero in the center only.

Output

101, 16061, 31013, 35053, 38083, 73037, 74047, 91019, 94049,
1120211, 1150511, 1160611, 1180811, 1190911, 1250521, 1280821,
1360631, 1390931, 1490941, 1520251


# The questions

Why, oh why didn’t I read has a zero in the center only in the first place?!?

# The solution

This is a candidate for brute forcing, but also with choosing the right amount of brutality.

In this case, we can leverage the structure of the valid solutions, which is something like this:

$d_0 d_1 .. d_n 0 d_n .. d_1 d_0$

The part before the 0 is an integer, right? Let’s call it $n. We only need to try different values of $n to tell different valid candidates.

We can do better, actually:

• There can be no 0, so we can turn every 0 into a 1;
• we can also skip all values of $n with a leading even digit$d_0$, as it’s going to produce an even cyclop number (which cannot be prime). So, let’s summon this gentle brute: #!/usr/bin/env perl use v5.24; use warnings; use experimental 'signatures'; no warnings 'experimental::signatures'; use ntheory 'is_prime'; my$n = shift // 20;
my $it = cyclop_prime_factory(); say$it->() for 1 .. $n; sub cyclop_prime_factory { my$n = 0;
return sub {
while ('necessary') {
++$n;$n =~ tr/0/1/;
$n = ($1 + 1) . $2 if$n =~ m{\A ([2468]) (.*) }mxs;
my $candidate =$n . '0' . reverse($n); return$candidate if is_prime($candidate); } }; }  I know, I know. Half of the times I bake a primality check in my solutions, the other half I use ntheory. Today it was the latter, OK?!? We’re generating an iterator, so that we can get as many valid numbers as we need, sorted in ascending order. The tr/0/1/ removes the unwanted 0 characters (as a matter of fact, we’re kind of counting base 9 here, using a rejection method); the following match allows us skipping leading even digits. Then we generate the candidate as a cyclop number. The same can be translated into Raku, although we’re using a class here. I don’t know why, this is my typical go-to solution in Raku. #!/usr/bin/env raku use v6; class CyclopFactory { ... } sub MAIN (Int$n = 20) {
my $it = CyclopFactory.new();$it.get.put for 1 .. $n; } class CyclopFactory { has$!n is built = 0;
method get {
loop {
$!n = ($!n + 1).Str;
$!n ~~ tr/0/1/;$!n = ($0 + 1) ~$1 if $!n ~~ /^ (<[ 2 4 6 8 ]>) (.*) /; my$candidate = $!n ~ '0' ~$!n.flip;
return $candidate if$candidate.is-prime;
}
}
}


Stay safe!