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All,
I was having a conversation with blokhead in the CB concerning the most efficient solution to this problem. Not having any idea how to determine the big O notation, I ran a few tests to see how well my solution scaled.

The first thing I noticed was the average number of guesses doubled every time I increased the search group by a factor of 10. Then I noticed something really cool - it also corresponded to a power of 2. This allowed me to calculate the average case scenario for any number

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $num = $ARGV[0] || 47; my $length = length $num; my $base = 10 ** ($length - 1); my $base_ave = 2 ** ($length - 1); my $next = 10 ** $length; my $next_ave = 2 ** $length; my $ave_diff = $next_ave - $base_ave; my $tot_diff = $next - $base; my $distance = $num - $base; my $guess = $base_ave + ($distance * $ave_diff) / $tot_diff; print "$guess\n";

So for 12_345 you can expect 16.42, and for 123_456_789 you can expect 262.67 As you can see this scales quite well. While this is the average case, the worst case scenario should still scale reasonably well.

Cheers - L~R


In reply to Re: Triangle Numbers Revisited by Limbic~Region
in thread Triangle Numbers Revisited by Limbic~Region

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