From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2008-07-14T16:05:39+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Symbolify (#169)


On Jul 13, 2008, at 18:45 , Rick DeNatale wrote:

> The basic approach is to generate an expression which works like a  
> lexical
> scan of the decimal representation of the (positive) integer, i.e.  
> it's the
> closed form of

My first version did roughly the same thing, but against the binary  
representation:

15 = 0b1111 = "2**3+4+2+1".encode

encode would substitute + for -- and gsub numbers in from the table.  
Powers of 2 were precalculated as were 0-9.

I also benchmarked and figured out that it was more often (roughly 55%  
of the time) faster and a smaller result if I subtract the difference  
between the next higher power of two and the number in question.

Regardless, answers got messy...