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 | |
by davido (Cardinal) on Nov 09, 2011 at 19:25 UTC |