Anonymous user
Talk:Addition-chain exponentiation: Difference between revisions
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RC is about comparing languages not about original research in a proven difficult area. In the life of this task we have only a few examples and more comment on their correctness. I too think that the task is not written for an RC audience. It could be improved/saved if a particular algorithm or set of algorithms are approved in the task description and pseudo code given otherwise the task is too broad and contentious. <br>
--[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] ([[User talk:Paddy3118|talk]]) 06:58, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
:Many tasks are only suited to a few languages, it's the very purpose of having so many languages: if one could handle all tasks as well or better than any other, there would be no point in programming in any other language. We know it's not the case.
:Furthermore, this is an old problem, described in Knuth's TAOCP. I think it's still a good candidate for RC, but maybe it should be amended to use much lower exponents: in the 200-600 range, it should be reasonably fast.
:However, it should then still be clearly stated whether star chains are accepted or not: I don't think it's a good idea since the algorithm provides no guarantee that the result is optimal, it's only an observation made by comparing with the true optimal solution. This would encourage solving a problem with the wrong tool, just because it happens to give the right answer by chance (and it does not with 12509, as explained above).
:On the other hand, it would also be doable with the current exponents, but then the task should mention a reference to an efficient algorithm.
:For low exponents, I can give a backtracking algorithm relatively easy to adapt: in Frotran 77, thus only ''if'' and ''goto'' are really needed, and it can be translated to a recursive algorithm, hence most language families can do it.
:[[User:Arbautjc|Arbautjc]] ([[User talk:Arbautjc|talk]]) 08:15, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
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