So, what are the populations of every town in Quebec and the number of posts by various authors to a hockey bulletin board hiding from you?
n
and a list of numbers
nums
and outputs a list of 10 values: the frequency with
which each digit 0–9 appears as the n
th
digit of one of the input numbers. However, we'll break that problem
down into easier steps. (Note: throughout this problem, you may
assume that the numbers processed are non-negative or you can use the
absolute value function to help you handle
negative numbers in a reasonable way.)
countDigits
.
countDigits(num)
calculates the number of digits in the
integer num
. countDigits
should evaluate to
1
for 0–9, 2
for 10–99,
3
for 100–999, etc. Hint: use repeated division by
10 to calculate the number of digits in num
. (There's
also a tricky solution using logarithms that avoids the repeated
division!)
nthDigitBack
.
nthDigitBack(n,num)
finds the n
th
lowest order digit in num
, i.e., the
n
th digit from the right. We take the
rightmost digit to be the 0
th digit.
nthDigitBack
should evaluate to 0
for digits
beyond the "start" of the number. Hint: use repeated division by 10
again, followed by the modulo operator to pick out just the rightmost
digit. (You could also use exponentiation to avoid the repeated
division!). For example:
nthDigitBack(0,123)
⇒ 3
nthDigitBack(1,123)
⇒ 2
nthDigitBack(2,123)
⇒ 1
nthDigitBack(3,123)
⇒ 0
nthDigitBack(0,0)
⇒ 0
nthDigitBack(3,18023)
⇒ 8
nthDigit
, using
nthDigitBack
and countDigits
.
nthDigit(n,num)
finds the n
th
highest order digit of num
, i.e., the
n
th digit from the left. We take the
leftmost digit to be the 0
th.
nthDigit
should evaluate to 0
for digits
beyond the "end" of the number. For example:
nthDigit(0,123)
⇒ 1
nthDigit(1,123)
⇒ 2
nthDigit(2,123)
⇒ 3
nthDigit(3,123)
⇒ 0
nthDigit(0,0)
⇒ 0
nthDigit(3,18023)
⇒ 2
nthDigitTally1
, using
nthDigit
. nthDigitTally1(n, num, tally)
assumes that tally
is a 10 element list tallying the
number of n
th digits seen so far. It updates
tally
to reflect the n
th digit of
num
. In other words, if d
is the
n
th digit of num
, then increment
the d
th element of tally
.
Examples:
nthDigitTally1(2, 1072, [0,0,1,2,0,0,3,0,9,0])
⇒ [0,0,1,2,0,0,3,1,9,0]
nthDigitTally1(0, 2541, [0,0,1,2,0,0,3,0,9,0])
⇒ [0,0,2,2,0,0,3,0,9,0]
nthDigitTally
, using
nthDigitTally1
. nthDigitTally(n, nums)
returns a tally of frequencies of 0–9 as the
n
th digits of all the numbers in
nums
.
Here's a sample test case. These are enrollments in Research Triangle Park colleges and universities in Fall 2000 (thanks to the "Research Triangle Regional Partnership" website: http://www.researchtriangle.org/data/enrollment.html).
Institution | Enrollment |
---|---|
Duke University | 12176 |
North Carolina Central University | 5476 |
Louisburg College (Junior College) | 543 |
Campbell University | 3490 |
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | 24892 |
North Carolina State University | 28619 |
Meredith College | 2595 |
Peace College | 603 |
Shaw University | 2527 |
St. Augustine's College | 1465 |
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary | 1858 |
enrollments
contains the enrollment
numbers from that table. Then:
nthDigitTally(1, enrollments)
⇒
[0,3,4,1,0,2,1,0,0,0]
readMysteriousNumbers
that reads
whitespace-separated integers from input (terminated by end-of-file)
and returns a list of the numbers suitable as input to
nthDigitTally
. Here's the university enrollment data
from above:
12176 5476 543 3490 24892 28619 2595 603 2527 1465 1858From this,
readMysteriousNumbers
should produce the list
[12176, 5476, 543, 3490, 24892, 28619, 2595, 603, 2527, 1465,
1858]
.
Optional: To be human-readable, the data files
should also allow labels for the data. We'll accomplish this by
allowing commenting in the input file. Change
readMysteriousNumbers
to ignore anything between
(* and *). (You may assume that the (* and
*) symbols will be surround by whitespace and that nested
comments — comments inside other comments — are not
allowed.) Now, the unversity data set can look like:
(* Duke University *) 12176 (* North Carolina Central University *) 5476 (* Louisburg College (Junior College) *) 543 (* Campbell University *) 3490 (* University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *) 24892 (* North Carolina State University *) 28619 (* Meredith College *) 2595 (* Peace College *) 603 (* Shaw University *) 2527 (* St. Augustine's College *) 1465 (* Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary *) 1858
n
from input followed by a data set. The program should tally the
n
th digits of the numbers in the data set and
print out a table of the results. For example, given:
1 12176 5476 543 3490 24892 28619 2595 603 2527 1465 1858Your program should print:
0s: 0 1s: 3 2s: 4 3s: 1 4s: 0 5s: 2 6s: 1 7s: 0 8s: 0 9s: 0
You need to submit your commented code implementing each step and a couple of tests to show that your code works.
Optional: If you want to find the patterns hidden in the numbers around you, try the following three-part bonus problem:
readMysteriousNumbers
. The data must all be separate
measurements of a single type of phenomenon. For example:
measurements of university/college enrollments across different
institutions (like above) or at the same institution across different
years; measurements of the flow rates of all the major rivers in
British Columbia; measurements of the height of 10000 randomly chosen
Vancouver residents; measurements of the number of hits per day on the
UBC computer science website over three years; measurements of the
length in characters of each article in the Wikipedia; measurements of
the population of the 1000 largest cities and townships in Canada;
etc. Furthermore, there must be at least 250 measurements in
the list (but more would be better!).
readMysteriousNumbers
, and one attachment with
labelled data (using the (* *)
style above).
nthDigitTally
). Are there any oddities in
the tallies? What about in other students' data?