anyone interested in looking at the following problem. we are trying to express numbers as minimal expressions using only the digits one two and three, with conventional arithmetic. so for instance
33 = 2^(3+2)+1 = 3^3+(3*2) are both minimal, using 4 digits but 33 = ((3+2)*2+1)*3 using 5 is not. I have tried coding a function to return the minimal representation for any integer, but haven't cracked it so far. The naive first attempt is to generate lots of random strings, eval() them and sort by size and value. this is inelegant and slow. I have a dim intuition that it could be done with a very clever bit of recursion, but the exact form so far eludes me. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
