# Prime numbers and universe factories

DevFeed: [Prime numbers and universe factories](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/prime-numbers-and-universe-factories-27097.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://andrea.corbellini.name/2015/02/15/prime-numbers-and-universe-factories/>)

Author: andreacorbellini

Published: 2015-02-15T16:54:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Andrea Corbellini](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/andrea-corbellini.md>)

Topics: [ASCII](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ascii.md>)

Tags: [ascii](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ascii.md>), [encoding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/encoding.md>), [fun](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/fun.md>), [math](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/math.md>), [numbers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/numbers.md>), [xkcd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/xkcd.md>)

## AI overview

The article explores how prime numbers can encode ASCII text, inspired by an XKCD comic. The author searches prime numbers for English messages and discusses the possibility of finding longer texts or software encoded this way, while noting uncertainty about some primality results.

## Source excerpt

I'm a XKCD fan, and I look it up regularly. There's a comic that I particularly enjoyed: Pi Equals. The comic Pi Equals, from XKCD.com (CC-BY-NC 2.5). Well, it appears that Randall was right in that there's a help message hidden somewhere. And I just found it in a prime number: 245178888024581899558766786108789912235672909204719666025638877624752119760547413887830514281649480308707369249 That number corresponds to the ASCII encoding ...