Question

Hey - I finished PS1a with little difficulty, but I'm totally lost with PS1b. I simply don't understand the question. Can someone explain the problem in music-major terms?

Answer 1

I think a big problem is I can't figure out what "e" is.

Answer 2

e is a constant like pi. It's just a number that's useful for figuring out certain kinds of problems. it's value is 2.718... You don't need to know what it is or include it specifically in your code in any way--if you use the log function as in

math.log(currentPrimeNumber)

it will automatically do the part of the calculation that involves e. You do not need to specify e.

Answer 3

Here's a restatement of the problem that you can use functionally:

Find all the primes up to some number which we will call x. That means that if x is 1000, you find all the prime numbers BELOW 1000. It does NOT mean that you find 1000 prime numbers.

Add together the logs of those prime numbers. That just means that for each prime, you do the operation math.log(prime) and add the result to the running total.

The total of the logs should be close to x. The higher x gets, the closer the sum of the logs should be, generally.

Answer 4

Okay that makes sense. It seems very similar to the first problem so I should be good from here. Thanks so much!