Determine all prime, palindrome string integers within a range

I have written a program in Python 3x to determine all the prime, palindrome string integers in the range of two given numbers.

from math import sqrt

def check_prime(n):
    if n<2:
        return False
    for i in range(2,int(sqrt(n))+1):
        if n%i == 0:
            return False
    else:
        return True

for times in range(5):
    a,b = map(int,input().split())
    ct = 0
    for n in range(a,b+1):
        if str(n) == str(n)[::-1] and check_prime(n):
            ct += 1
    print(ct)

How can I make this program run faster, mainly optimizing my check_prime function so that it is faster than currently?

One suggestion: That sqrt is expensive, and you can eliminate it in a lot of common cases. For example: if any number except 2 is even, then it's not prime. Every second time you call check_prime, you're passing an even number.

So you can check n%2 before the loop, and eliminate that sqrt on half of your calls. You can extend this to check the first few primes explicitly, before starting your loop:

def check_prime(n):
    if n<2:
        return False
    if n%2==0:
        return n==2
    if n%3==0:
        return n==3
    if n%5==0:
        return n==5
    for i in range(7, int(sqrt(n))+1, 2):
        if n%i == 0:
            return False
    return True

You get diminishing returns by adding more checks. I benchmarked the above at about 2x as fast as your original code.

StackExchange Code Review Q#71036, answer score: 4