serras

Talking about Toys

Every year Santa 🎅 brings joy (and presents 🎁) to all the kids in the world. Well, not when I was a child! Following the usual Spanish traditions, the Three Reyes Magos brought me presents in their camels 🐫 following the Star 💫 Nowadays, it's Sinterklaas who puts pepernoten in my shoes 👞. Because in fact there's not one, but a group of present-bringing people, distributed across the globe 🌐, each with their own part of the world to cover (or you really thought just one man and eight reindeers could do it all by their own?)

In order to communicate, they need a way to exchange information about presents. Since they are all very wise, they've agreed to use Haskell, so this information is represented using algebraic data types. Here are some types related to building blocks:

data Block = Block BlockBrand String Color
data BlockBrand = Lego | KNex

amacgillivray

Solving Perfect Numbers Quickly with Haskell

Walking through the stages of optimizing a perfect-number algorithm; starting with a naive approach, rewriting to use the Euclid-Euler theorem, and then leveraging the Miller-Rabin primality test.

A Frustratingly Naive Solution

On a dark and stormy night in Kansas, many years ago, I sat in front of my laptop - face lit only by the screen.

A homework assignment had tasked us with writing a basic haskell function to find every perfect number between 1 and 9000. We weren't studying numbers, nor did we discuss perfect numbers in class. The number "9000" was chosen as the upper limit due to the complexity associated with finding perfects using typical methods.