Every now and then I give project Euler a quick browse. Since I have been playing with F# I have found it a great way to learn the basics of the language. Today I thought I would give problem 1 an attempt…
Problem 1
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
My F# Solution
I broke this problem into two functions… 1) be able to generate a collection of numbers that are multiples of a number but but are smaller than another number.
let GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY X Y = X |> Seq.unfold (fun i -> if (i<Y) then Some(i, i+X) else None)
I then needed something that generated collections for multiples of 3 & 5 and then removed any duplicates. Once this was done I would need to sum these all together to get a result. I found the Seq object to be extremely useful to achieve this…
let Multiples = Seq.append (GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY 3 1000) (GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY 5 1000) |> Seq.distinct |> Seq.fold(fun acc a -> acc + a) 0 |> Console.WriteLine |> Console.ReadLine
My complete solution was …
open System
let GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY X Y = X |> Seq.unfold (fun i -> if (i<Y) then Some(i, i+X) else None)
let Multiples = Seq.append (GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY 3 1000) (GenerateMultiplesOfXbelowY 5 1000) |> Seq.distinct |> Seq.fold(fun acc a -> acc + a) 0 |> Console.WriteLine |> Console.ReadLine
Which seemed to generate the correct result in a relatively short period of time although I am sure I will get some comments from the experts who know of some intrinsic method to achieve all of this in one method call.
