Re: LOGO-L> Xmas - The Gift of Life - Conway's +...

[yehuda <yehuka@softhome.net>]

Bob Gorman wrote:

< snip>

> I wanted to know how many possible games of solitaire
> could be dealt. Since my first love was Mathematics, I knew the answer
> was 52! (52 factorial). Having had brief affairs with number theory, cryptoanalysis
> etc, I've known since I was a teen-ager that the answer was about 68 digits
> long. 35 Years in the computer industry, while it feds the kids, etc. didn't
> help, and indeed frustrated me more. Almost every computer language out
> there cuts out at 10-12 digits and goes to E-notation. But I wanted to
> know exactly how many hands were possible!

Hi Bob,

With LCSI Logo you could SETPRECISION to up to 1000 meaningful digits.

I remember another version of Logo, which featured BIGNUM, and you could carry out  integer calculations with number as-big-as-you-wish (limited only by memory size).

Scheme (in all its versions?) features BIGNUM. So to calculate 52! you can write:

> (define (factorial n)
>   (if (< n 2)
>       1
>       (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

> (factorial 52)
The answer appears in virtually no time:
> 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
Have a Happy New Year,

Yehuda

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http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/lab/2276/
e-mail: yehuka@softhome.net
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