This one isn't, but I liked the program I wrote to solve it because it demonstrates how nice lazy streams are.
;; Microsoft Research 15th Anniversary Problem: A special squarish age. ;; A number is squarish if it is the product of two consecutive integers. ;; e.g. 6 is squarish because it is the product of 2 and 3 ;; A colleague claims that his age is squarish, and furthermore, that his last squarish birthday was a squarish number of years ago. ;; What age could he be? (def squarish (map (fn[[x y]] (* x y)) (partition 2 1 (iterate inc 0)))) (def squarishdiffs (map - (drop 1 squarish) squarish)) (defn find-in-increasing-seq [x seq] (cond (empty? seq) false (< (first seq) x) (recur x (rest seq)) (= (first seq) x) true (> (first seq) x) false)) (defn squarish? [x] (find-in-increasing-seq x squarish)) (def possible-ages (mapcat (fn [s d] (if (squarish? d) (list s) '())) (drop 1 squarish) squarishdiffs)) (take 10 possible-ages) ;; He's probably 42. 12 is a bit young for a colleague, 110 is pushing it.
Nice!
ReplyDeleteCan we redefine find-in-increasing-seq as follow:
(defn find-in-increasing-seq [x seq]
(some #(= x) seq))
Tzach, you could if the sequence was finite. (I'm assuming you mean #(= % x) rather than #(= x), which is always true.)
ReplyDeleteWith an infinite sequence, how will it know to stop searching if it doesn't find x after the first 1000000 entries?