baptiste auguie wrote: > 2009/12/19 David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net>: >> On Dec 19, 2009, at 9:06 AM, baptiste auguie wrote: >> >>> Dear list, >>> >>> In a little numbers game, I've hit a performance snag and I'm not sure >>> how to code this in C. >>> >>> The game is the following: how many 8-digit numbers have the sum of >>> their digits equal to 17? >> And are you considering the number "00000089" to be in the acceptable set? >> Or is the range of possible numbers in 10000079:98000000 ? >> > > The latter, the first digit should not be 0. But if you have an > interesting solution for the other case, let me know anyway. > > I should also stress that this is only for entertainment and curiosity's sake. > > baptiste >
I realize I'm late coming to this, but I was reading it in my post-vacation catch-up and it sounded interesting so I thought I'd give it a shot. After coding a couple of solutions that were exponential in time (for the number of digits), I rearranged things and came up with something that is linear in time (for the number of digits) and gives the count of numbers for all sums at once: library(plyr) nsum3 <- function(digits) { digits <- as.integer(digits)[[1L]] if (digits==1) { rep(1,9) } else { dm1 <- nsum3(digits-1) Reduce("+", llply(0:9, function(x) {c(rep(0,x),dm1,rep(0,9-x))})) } } nsums <- llply(1:8, nsum3) nsums[[5]][17] # [1] 3675 nsums[[8]][17] # [1] 229713 The whole thing runs in well under a second on my machine (a several years old dual core Windows machine). In the results of nsum3, the i-th element is the number of "numbers" whose digits sum to i. The basic idea is recursion on the number of digits; if n_{t,d} is the number of d-digit "numbers" that sum to t, then n_{t,d} = \sum_{i\in(0,9)} n_{t-i,d-1}. (Adding the digit i to each of those "numbers" makes their sum t and increases the digits to d). When digits==1, then 0 isn't a valid choice and that also implies the sum of digits can't be 0, which fits well with the 1 indexing of arrays. -- Brian Diggs, Ph.D. Senior Research Associate, Department of Surgery, Oregon Health & Science University ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.