java - Checking if an int is prime more efficiently

Question

I recently was part of a small java programming competition at my school. My partner and I have just finished our first pure oop class and most of the questions were out of our league so we settled on this one (and I am paraphrasing somewhat): "given an input integer n return the next int that is prime and its reverse is also prime for example if n = 18 your program should print 31" because 31 and 13 are both prime. Your .class file would then have a test case of all the possible numbers from 1-2,000,000,000 passed to it and it had to return the correct answer within 10 seconds to be considered valid.

We found a solution but with larger test cases it would take longer than 10 seconds. I am fairly certain there is a way to move the range of looping from n,..2,000,000,000 down as the likely hood of needing to loop that far when n is a low number is small, but either way we broke the loop when a number is prime under both conditions is found. At first we were looping from 2,..n no matter how large it was then i remembered the rule about only looping to the square root of n. Any suggestions on how to make my program more efficient? I have had no classes dealing with complexity analysis of algorithms. Here is our attempt.

public class P3
{

   public static void main(String[] args){

    long loop = 2000000000;
    long n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
    for(long i = n; i<loop; i++)
    {
      String s = i +"";
      String r = "";
      for(int j = s.length()-1; j>=0; j--)
        r = r + s.charAt(j);
      if(prime(i) && prime(Long.parseLong(r)))
      {
          System.out.println(i);
          break;
      }
    }
    System.out.println("#");
  }

  public static boolean prime(long p){


for(int i = 2; i<(int)Math.sqrt(p); i++)
    {
      if(p%i==0)
        return false;
    }
    return true;
  }
}

ps sorry if i did the formatting for code wrong this is my first time posting here. Also the output had to have a '#' after each line thats what the line after the loop is about Thanks for any help you guys offer!!!

Answer 1

First you should precompute all prime numbers up to 2,000,000,000 using something like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. You can store whether each number is prime in a bit array.

This is pretty fast, and then checking each individual number for primality is a simple lookup.

If you can't do this because you need to run a new instance of your program for each test case, use a fast primality testing algorithm like Miller-Rabin.