Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Meanwhile, I'm still thinking...

I took a quick look at choices, and I don't see an obvious way to generate them in what would correspond to ascending order. (Though that doesn't mean there isn't one.)

One thing we can do, though... take a look at noTwos, the source of by far the most of the d-digit Ys for all but the smallest d values.

noTwos n
    | n == 1     = [1,3]
    | even n     = base
    | otherwise  = concat [[p, p + tenToThe halfN] | p <- base]
    where halfN = n `div` 2
          base = justOnes n (min 3 (halfN - 1))


In particular, look at how base is calculated. Suppose n == 2 * k for some k. Then for n and n + 1, halfN - 1 has the same value and thus min 3 (halfN - 1) has the same value. Sure, n is different, but that just means for n + 1 there's a one digit gap left to either put a one in or leave at zero. Check it out.

*Main> justOnes 2 0
[11]
*Main> justOnes 3 0
[101]
*Main> justOnes 4 1
[1001,1111]
*Main> justOnes 5 1
[10001,11011]
*Main> justOnes 6 2
[100001,101101,110011,111111]
*Main> justOnes 7 2
[1000001,1010101,1100011,1110111]


So, corresponding to a base value x for noTwos (2 * k), the corresponding value for noTwos (2 * k + 1) is

let (a, b) = x `divMod` (tenToThe k)
in a * tenToThe (k + 1) + b

Less work than going through justOnes, I'd say... and it applies whether we figure out a clever way to generate the values in order or not. Note also that this mapping preserves numerical order, so if we do find a way to cleverly generate these values in order, taking advantage of this mapping won't mess that up.

We can save the base values for even numbers, though it would be nice if we could somehow notice when we do their successors and render them garbage collectable; otherwise that's 15,275 Integers hanging around in lists. Haskell has some memoization types and functions around that go beyond the simple lists as arrays we've been doing, but I'm not sure whether they support something like that.

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