you dont get to do that for conditional generation though. When we have a target then we have to generate multiple, pick closest to target, and discard the rest.
I dont think it will max out. I brute forced it upto 10 million and I got the following numbers (5, 679) (6, 6788) (7, 68889) (8, 2677889) sure the numbers are exponential but no reason to suspect that a glass ceiling exists.
For a radix of 10, there is thought to be no number with a multiplicative persistence > 11: this is known to be true for numbers up to 10 to the power of 50.
Thanks for the link, I dug a little more and came across [1] which mentions a contribution by erdos to the effect that persistence might not be bounded. I guess I might spend some time to figure out number 12 :) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050214141815/http://www.wschnei...
are you talking about her comment that Python has no data abstraction? Even I found that odd, maybe she was only talking about the lack of static types as opposed to java, c# which are "expert languages"
I think the point is that data abstraction in python is just a suggestion. If you follow convention, things can be abstracted to an extent. But there is nothing that enforces these abstractions on a user; you are not bound to operate only within a constrained context. Also, certain types of abstractions aren't possible in python because of the lack of interfaces.