pcjs/tests/node/puzzled/puzzle5.js

74 lines
2.9 KiB
JavaScript

/*
* From "Puzzled Programmers", p. 32:
*
* Can you write a program that finds a four-digit number that is the sum of the fourth powers of its digits?
* In C or Pascal, your program should execute in less than 1 second; in BASIC, it should take about 35 seconds.
*
* As one of the fictitious programmers in the book says:
*
* "That's not hard. Just generate all the four-digit numbers, take the fourth power of each digit, add them up,
* and see if that's the same as the four-digit number."
*
* But as another notes:
*
* "Well, yes, that would work, but it's not very efficient and would make a rather slow program."
*
* Obvious performance considerations include:
*
* 1) There are only 10 possible powers-of-four we're dealing with, so it would be best to calculate all ten
* ahead of time, rather than calculating each one thousands of times in a brute-force approach.
*
* 2) We might only want to sum unique combinations of those powers, since it's a waste of time doing it for, say,
* "1123", "1231", and any other combination of two 1s, one 2, and one 3. However, since every combination of
* digits does have a unique value, and since we want to display all values meeting the criteria, there might not
* be a useful optimization along these lines.
*
* One wrinkle is the digit 0: we'll assume that by "four-digit number", the puzzle didn't really mean to include
* numbers with leading zeros, like "0007" and "0099", so we'll start with 1000.
*
* The solutions in "Puzzled Programmers" are very much hard-coded around the 4-digit nature of the puzzle, because
* they all rely on four nested loops (one loop per decimal place). They also perform a small optimization that
* is really only noticeable when using BASIC: calculate a powers-of-four sum for every tenth number, and then for the
* next ten numbers, they need only do one more addition for the final digit (ie, in the ones place). I added the
* same optimization below, but without the necessity of a hard-coded number of loops, allowing the "power" variable
* to be changed in order to investigate whether any 5-digit numbers, 6-digit numbers, etc, have similar properties.
*/
"use strict";
let p = new Array(10), power = 4, digits = power;
let start = Math.pow(10, digits-1), end = Math.pow(10, digits);
/**
* sumPowers(n)
*
* @param {number} n
* @returns {number}
*/
function sumPowers(n) {
let total = 0;
while (n) {
total += p[n % 10];
n = (n / 10)|0;
}
return total;
}
function run() {
for (let d = 0; d < 10; d++) {
p[d] = Math.pow(d, power);
}
let n = start;
let m = (n / 10)|0;
while (true) {
let sum = sumPowers(m);
for (let d = 0; d <= 9; d++) {
if (sum + p[d] == n + d) console.log(n + d);
}
m += 1;
n += 10;
if (n >= end) break;
}
}
run();