Well, the correct answer to "what is the 211th Fibonacci number is, of course, 55835073295300465536628086585786672357234389. This is way beyond the limits of integer arithmetic on a poor little digital computer, and you will, as Sarah Reichelt pointed out, start to overflow the accumulators at around Fibonacci number 79. Unfortunately there's no warning about the overflow, and as Colin Holgate found out, you can't calculate this the easy way. So you have to do the Long Addition yourself, pretending that you're the digital computer.
So here are the standings: Colin Holgate came in first with the right answer but couldn't show how to do it in xtalk. Apparently he looked the answer up on the web, so he gets the Fundamentalist award for getting the literal answer to the question first. It *is* what I asked. Alex Tweedly also came in with the right answer by screen-scraping an existing web page. So Alex gets the James Kirk "I couldn't win the game so I reprogrammed the computer" award. It's not exactly what I had in mind, but I should have phrased the question differently. Sarah Reichelt gets the Coolness award for doing this on on-rev, but ran into the overflow problem and so came up with the wrong answer. I went out for a walk, came back, and found that both Brian Yennie and Jerry Jensen had come in with the right solution. Brian beat Jerry by 18 minutes because Jerry's on digest mode (Jerry- I got off digest mode last year and I'm *really* glad I did). They're both pretty close to the approach I took: managing the carry bit yourself and creating a numeric text string for the result. But somehow Brian's code is about 20% faster than either Jerry's or mine. So Brian gets the Elegance award for fast and accurate code. I went back to look at Sarah's code, but I see she's already modified her web page to use Brian's algorithm, with a nice twist. http://troz.on-rev.com/fib.irev (I would have given more extra credit points but nobody declared their variables <g>) -- -Mark Wieder mwie...@ahsoftware.net _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution