test On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Trip Technician <luke.d...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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 >
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