RogerBW's Blog

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved list filtering and sequence generation. (Note that this ends today.)

Task 1: Special Numbers

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to find the sum of the squares of all special elements of the given array.

An element $int[i] of @ints is called special if i divides n, i.e. n % i == 0. Where n is the length of the given array. Also the array is 1-indexed for the task.

Well, there's a fairly obvious way to do this iteratively, as seen here in Raku:

sub specialnumbers(@a) {
    my $t = 0;
    for (0 .. @a.end) -> $i {
        if (@a.elems % ($i + 1) == 0) {
            $t += @a[$i] * @a[$i];
        }
    }
    return $t;
}

However, I prefer a purely functional approach. I wasn't able to wrangle Kotlin or Scala into doing this, though I think they can; but it was fairly straightforward in Rust:

fn specialnumbers(a: Vec<u32>) -> u32 {
    a.iter()
        .enumerate()
        .filter(|(i, _n)| a.len() % (i + 1) == 0)
        .map(|(_i, n)| n * n)
        .sum()
}

and the equivalent in PostScript with my extensions:

/specialnumbers {
    0 dict begin
    dup /l exch length def
    enumerate.array
    { 0 get 1 add l exch mod 0 eq } filter
    { 1 get dup mul } map
    { add } reduce
    end
} bind def

Task 2: Unique Sum Zero

You are given an integer, $n.

Write a script to find an array containing $n unique integers such that they add up to zero.

Obviously there are infinite possible solutions to this, but I chose a simple one

(1, 2, 3, ..., -sum(1..n-1))

with the last term calculated using the identity:

sum(1..n) = n * (n + 1) / 2

And therefore, in JavaScript:

function uniquesumzero(n) {
    if (n == 1) {
        return [0];
    }
    let p = Array(n - 1).fill().map((element, index) => index + 1);
    p.push(-n * (n-1) / 2);
    return p;
}

Some other approaches might have been:

(1, -1, 2, -2, ... )

with a zero at the end if $n is odd; or

(1, 2, 4, 8, ... -(2^(n-1) - 1))

Full code on github.