Friday 15 February 2013

Four fours

The "Four fours" problem has probably wasted many people's time... As I recently rediscovered the fun in solving this, but I didn't have the patience to figure out how to get more than 2 or 3 values, I started writing a program for it instead. Supposedly, computers are better at number crunching.

It takes about 2 15 seconds to compute five fours on my super-speedy 1.0 GHz AMD not-even-sure-it's-Turing-complete thing. However, trying with seven fours is only for the brave and the patient. The algorithm stores partial results in some huge matrix to reduce computation time, but I have a feeling that this has consequences (especially in JavaScript).

I want to see all

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