my attempt to do the exercises in sicp.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

sicp exercise 3.63


;;Exercise 3.63.  Louis Reasoner asks why the sqrt-stream procedure was not written in the following more straightforward way, without the local variable guesses:

;;(define (sqrt-stream x)
;;  (cons-stream 1.0
;;               (stream-map (lambda (guess)
;;                             (sqrt-improve guess x))
;;                           (sqrt-stream x))))
;;
;;Alyssa P. Hacker replies that this version of the procedure is considerably less efficient because it performs redundant computation. Explain Alyssa's answer. Would the two versions still differ in efficiency if our implementation of delay used only (lambda () <exp>) without using the optimization provided by memo-proc (section 3.5.1)?


;; Answer:
;; The version presented above doesnt work on the already created stream, it starts creating stream right from the beginning for every iteration of the computation. This method is of same efficiency as the version of delay without memo-proc.

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