// do something here

I saw a story this morning in Gizmodo about hard logic puzzles, and one of them caught my attention for some brute force computational processing.

Martin Gardner was a famous mathematician, and in one of his books, he talks about the persistence of a number as the number of times it iteratively takes to multiply the individual digits of an integer together until you end up with a single digit number. As an example, if you consider the number 25, the persistence is 2 because 2×5 equals 10 (step 1), and then 1×0 equals 0 (step 2).

So here is a quick algorithm I threw together in VB.NET to find the smallest number that has a particular persistence:

Module Module1

    Function Persistence(num As Integer) As Integer

        Dim n As Integer = Math.Abs(num)
        Dim p As Integer = 0
        While n >= 10
            Dim nString = n.ToString()
            n = 1
            For i = 0 To nString.Length - 1
                n *= Convert.ToInt16(nString.Substring(i, 1))
            Next
            p = p + 1
        End While

        Return p

    End Function

    Sub Main()

        Dim persistenceList As List(Of Integer) = New List(Of Integer)()

        Dim p As Integer
        For i = 1 To 10000000
            p = Persistence(i)
            If persistenceList.Count < p Then
                Console.WriteLine("Just found a persistence of " + p.ToString() + " for " + i.ToString())
                persistenceList.Add(i)
            End If
        Next

        Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...")
        Console.ReadKey()

    End Sub

End Module

When you run this, you see something like this in the console:

Just found a persistence of 1 for 10
Just found a persistence of 2 for 25
Just found a persistence of 3 for 39
Just found a persistence of 4 for 77
Just found a persistence of 5 for 679
Just found a persistence of 6 for 6788
Just found a persistence of 7 for 68889
Just found a persistence of 8 for 2677889
Press any key to exit...

Above a persistence of 8, it can take a very very long time to brute force a solution.

BTW, Happy Birthday to Anton Fig, a fantastic drummer who has worked with one of my favorite artists, Joe Bonamassa.