Created on: July 8, 1997

The numbers 1,2,3 can be 1,2,3 or 1,3,2 or 2,3,1 or 2,1,3 or 3,1,2 or 3,2,1. That is 6 possible combinations which comes from 3*2*1. Above 3 number's it gets hard to impossible to figure all the combinations manually. The number 5 has 120 possibilities 5*4*3*2*1. This problem ought to be cake for a computer program if only I could write it. Help if you can.

Clayton
ascrooks@skn.net

At first I thought that you wanted a algorithm to find the factorial of a number and since Click & Create can't handle values greater than 999,999,999 I figured it would be easier just to set the values than to calculate them.  Only the factorials 0! through 12! are less than 999,999,999. But then I read your question again, to my horror, and found that what you really were looking for was a way to create a list of all of the solutions or permuatations for a given factorial. Are you sane? And you want to do this with Click & Create?!?

Yahoo's Mathematics Section:

If you ever want to learn more about Math you can't go wrong by starting here. There's even a section specifically on Combinatorics.

If you look around you'll find some facinating topics and you can even submit your own questions.

This program will find and list all of the permutations of a factorial. It's a lot easy just to download and run it then to build one of your own from scratch in Click & Create.

There are two ways one could go about this. One way would be to design a algorithm that would go through all of the combinations. Some kind of miricle if you ask me. I spent a while trying to find a way to do exactly this. It appears to require more programming expertise that I have right now. If you have any ideas please share them. It's a lot harder than you might think at first.

Another way would be a Brute Force technique. Just generate random sets and compare to list of previously generated sets and see if there is a match. If there isn't add the set. If there is generate another set. Now doesn't that seem nice and simple. Almost like someone might be able to do it, huh. Well almost is right.

I had a choice either I could use and Ini Object or the Combo Box to store my list of generated sets. I choose the Combo Box because it has a limit of over 32,000 items and that would hold up to factorial 7 which equals 5,040. I wish I had used the Ini Object now it had a limit of 64K in file size and that should have been enough to do some higher factorials. But waiting for your computer to find the 5,040 permutation randomly would take more patience than most of us have. I wonder how long? I seperated  my program into groups so I'll seperate my answer into the same groups.

Solving the factorial is the easy part. It's just a matter of having the user select a value from 1 through 7 and store it in Global Value 1. Now multiply Global Value 1 and Global Value 2. The Global Value 2 was set to 1 at the Start of the Frame. And now you subtract one the Global Value 1. You continue doing this as long as the Global Value 1 is greater than 1. When the Global Value 1 equals 1 then the Global Value 2 equals the factorial of the number the user selected.

What I needed now was a way to generate sets. I decided the quickest way would be the create a number of Active Objects equal to the Value the user selected. Then Spread a Number into the Alterable Value A of the Active Object. Now all I had to do was Pick an Active Object at Random and add paste it on the end of a Text Object until I had the whole set. It makes sense if you study the source code.

Here's where I had problems. My plan was to compare the Text Object's Alterable Text to every line in the Combo Box. If it wasn't there already add it. If it was there generate a new set until the number of line equal the value of the factorial of the number the user selected. The code is there but something is wrong with it.

I've included the source code for you to download which should help with your understanding.
factors.zip (4 KB): Download Click & Create source code for Recursive Programming.

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