Ulam's Spiral: Has it been explained or not?

Hmm. This would slightly speed up the naive O(sqrt(n)) algorithm, true, but not by enough to make it competitive with the best algorithms known. If all we can do is efficiently generate the primes in sequence, then it’s not clear to me how that would substantially speed up algorithms like ECM which don’t perform large numbers of trial divisions. (Primality testing is already polynomial, so it’s not like the efficiency gain would be huge anyway.)