Project Euler #10 (Python)

Question

Why is my algorithm for finding the sum of all prime numbers below 2 million so slow? I\'m a fairly beginner programmer and this is what I came up with for finding the solution:

Answer 1

First off, you're looping over too many numbers. You don't need to check if EVERY number less than a given number is a divisor to check if a number is prime (I'll let you figure out why this is yourself). You are running hundreds of billions of loops, where hundreds of millions will do.

Something like this works faster, but is by no means optimal:

    value=2
    for i in range(3, 2000000):
        prime=True 
        if i%2 != 0:
            for j in range(3, int(round(sqrt(i)+1)),2):
                if i % j==0:
                    prime=False
        else:
            prime=False
        if prime==True:
            value+=i
    print value