Hey, here's an example

[sniffnoy]

It's funny how the errors that should be incredibly obvious can fail to be so until you see an example. Of course "as long as the first element of the list is too high, run the function again" will never terminate if the first element of the list never gets removed!

...unfortunately, it's not a case of "just remove the first element of the list, then"; the entire recursion is wrong and will have to be redone...

-Harry

(Also, in neat non-math things: This week I learned how to work a 16mm projector!)

Comments

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Automated testing? How does that work?

Right now I'm just testing broken functions piece-by-piece with ghci...

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Oh OK, nice.

[joshuazelinsky.livejournal.com]

And you claimed that I was spending more time thinking about this than you were... (Incidentally, I think I may have the constant down to 2.64 but that's absolutely as far as I'm going. I'm serious this time).

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Well, right now - i.e. for what, several weeks now? - I'm just coding up what I already know. The fact that I initially wrote it down wrong, doesn't mean I don't know how to do it correctly, just how to code it properly... so I'm not really spending much time thinking about the actual problem, just how to code up this one thing so I can continue my computations and see how far I can push this method. Then maybe I'll start thinking about the actual problem again...