in reply to Operations with Extremely Large Numbers

If you want to use huge factorials for practical calculations related to the magnitude of the number, rather than as a demonstration of being able to exactly determine every digit of such a factorial, then a relatively fast way to do such things in Perl is Math::BigApprox.

Computing 2032597! still takes a while because it actually does the 2 million multiplications and, although Math::BigApprox operations are about 10x faster than Math::BigInt operations (even when using GMP, same for bignum) and don't fail for this case, they are still about 20x slower than vanilla Perl math operations here.

% perl -MMath::BigApprox=c -e'$s= time(); $f= !c(203259); print $f, $ +/, time()-$s," seconds\n"' 4.81043e+990637 14 seconds % perl -MMath::BigApprox=c -e'$s= time(); $f= !c(2032597); print $f, $ +/, time()-$s," seconds\n"' 1e+11938984 133 seconds

Not an ideal solution, but perhaps an option you weren't aware of.

- tye        

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Re^2: Operations with Extremely Large Numbers (BigApprox)
by jjw017 (Initiate) on Nov 09, 2011 at 18:29 UTC

    Thanks for the interesting insight tye. Going along those lines, is it possible to memoize operations of BigApprox?

      Yes.

      use Math::BigApprox qw/Fact/; use Benchmark qw/cmpthese/; use Memoize; memoize( 'Fact', INSTALL => 'fastFact' ); our $test = 20000; print "$test!\t=>\t", Fact($test), "\n"; cmpthese ( -5, { Fact => sub{ my $a = Fact($test) }, fastFact => sub{ my $a = fastFact($test) }, } );

      Results...

      20000! => 1.819206e+77337 Rate Fact fastFact Fact 7.89/s -- -100% fastFact 297159/s 3766395% --

      You almost need Math::BigApprox to deal with the percent improvement when memoized. A factorial is one of those "pure functions" where memoization pays off if you intend to use the same params more than once.


      Dave