Two Observations on Probabilistic Primality Testing

In this note, we make two loosely related observations on Rabin's probabilistic primality test. The first remark gives a rather strange and provocative reason as to why is Rabin's test so good. It turns out that a single iteration fails with a non-negligible probability on a composite number of the form 4j +3 only if this number happens to be easy to split. The second observation is much more fundamental because is it not restricted to primality testing: it has profound consequences for the entire field of probabilistic algorithms. There we ask the question: how good is Rabin's algorithm? Whenever one wishes to produce a uniformly distributed random probabilistic prime with a given bound on the error probability, it turns out that the size of the desired prime must be taken into account