Question

So I have a question about the prime question in problem set 1. Im trying to approach the question as a list problem. I already learned to test for primes in my code but Im having difficult asking for the 1000th term since pyscritpter keeps crashing, I think there is something wrong with my while loop...

def search_primes(n):
#I start by having an empty list
terms=[]
#Then we assigned i the value of 0 because we want to start counting.
i = 0
#the loop would stop as soon as i is equal to n
while i<=n:
# My condition is that in order to append to the list the num

Answer 1

def search_primes(n):
#I start by having an empty list
terms=[]
#Then we assigned i the value of 0 because we want to start counting.
i = 0
#the loop would stop as soon as i is equal to n
while i<=n:
# My condition is that in order to append to the list the number should
# pass the Prime_Test which already has 0,1, and 2 in consideration.
if Prime_Test(i) is True:
#Here is the new assigned value of i gets added to the list
terms.append(i)
#just to make sure the list keeps going up
i = i + 1
#We're interested on the final value of the terms
return terms[n]

Answer 2

Your logic is sound but I think I see where the problem occurs. Let's go over your steps in pseudo-code.

# first you initialize a set of variables
# terms is a list [] that will store your list of primes as you find them
# n is the nth prime that you are looking for; in this case, it will be 1000 but you are writing as a function so you can generalize
# i is the particular number you are testing for primality

### a problem that i see is that you are missing a variable that's keeping track of which prime number your are at; you will need to define a variable such as count

# you then setup a while loop to cycle through the integers until you have find the 1000th prime.

so your while loop needs to look like this:

while count<=n:

not

while i<n:

you will increase count by 1 when i is a prime. i is the number you are testing for primality. count is the count you are on in terms of your search for the nth prime.

Hope that helps.