so... for a few days i've been revising this Code (in Gauche / Lisp / Scheme) to make it run faster.. and last night i could improve it enough to give me the result i wanted in 72 minutes or so (on my slow PC at home).
( Maybe... within a few months, i'll write the same program in Python .... to see if it runs 10 or 20 times faster. ) this was the first time i've used Caching (memoization). ----- instead of calculating (at run-time) Factorial(x) and Combination(x,y) millions of times, i made 2 tables in advance... A simple Table-lookup (Vector-ref in Scheme) seems 100 -- 1000 times faster. One thought i had was... Maybe Python's Factorial(x) and Combination(x,y) (in Numpy ?) are already so fast that... i don't have to do the Caching (memoization) ??? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list