Agent Less Than Zero

I just started a new job, and I'm writing a lot of Java all of a sudden. Hey, maybe I'll learn Scala and piss off my new colleagues just as I was pissing people off with F# a few weeks ago! Or maybe I'll put off blogging about F# for a few weeks until I get settled in. I have been using F# to solve Project Euler problems, but I feel guilty blogging about those, since I'd have to give away answers.

In the meantime, I have to agree with Charles Barkley, who said, "I think the Washington Wizards have got to be the dumbest team in the history of civilization." I think that Caron Butler is a smart player, mind you, and he *should* have had the ball in his hands at the end of tonight's game.

Memoization, etc.

I've been sweating over some problems at Project Euler, and I've verified that I'm no mathematician. Some enterprising Haskell programmers got there way before I did, and if I were inclined to cheat, I'd simply translate their solutions into F#. However, in the effort or out of the necessity to remain pure, they don't use for-loops over arrays, or their own memoization, which I'd almost certainly do for any production code that had to calculate the Fibonacci series...well, actually, I don't do that kind of work. Anyway...

I did find the Haskell samples instructive, though I don't want to get sidetracked from my project of learning F#. To this end I've once again resorted to Don Syme's thoughts on memoization: here on the CAML list, and here more recently, where he avails himself of some popular .NET collections. So a memoized Fibonacci function in Dr. Syme's older formulation looks like this:

> #light;;

> let cache f =

-   let table = ref [] in

-   fun n ->

-      try

-        List.assoc n !table

-      with Not_found ->

-        let f_n = f n in

-           table := (n, f_n) :: !table;

-           f_n

-

-

- let rec fib_mem =

-    cache (function

-              // You'd better return a bigint, not an int!

-              ¦ 0 -> 0I

-              ¦ 1 -> 1I

-              ¦ n -> fib_mem (n - 1) + fib_mem (n - 2))

-

-

- ;;



val cache : ('a -> 'b) -> ('a -> 'b)

val fib_mem : (int -> bigint)


> fib_mem(1000);;

val it : bigint

= 434665576869374564356885276750406258025646605173717804024817290895365554179490

51890403879840079255169295922593080322634775209689623239873322471161642996440906

533187938298969649928516003704476137795166849228875I

val ns : seq

Several problems at Project Euler ask you to do something with the first 10 or last 10 digits of some big integer; for anyone who was wondering how to do that with a number such as the one above, here's one way:

> fib_mem(1000) |> Seq.unfold (fun n -> if n > 0I
-                                         then
-                                          let quotient,remainder = BigInt.divmod n 10I
-                                          Some (remainder, quotient)
-                                        else
-                                          None);;
val it : seq = seq [5I; 7I; 8I; 8I; ...]
>

You'll notice that the least significant digits appear first, which is of course by design, since dividing by 10 is probably cheap. The last thing I'd want to do is reverse this sequence, i.e.

-               |> List.of_seq
-               |> List.rev;;

I could clean this up further by applying BigInt.to_Int32 to the generated elements, etc. To sum the first 10 digits (note that this is *not* the Project Euler problem; I'm not about to give away any answers) I could go further, like so:

-               |> Seq.take 10
-               |> Seq.fold1 (+);;

You get the idea.