birthday number 10

Alright, let’s talk about this “birthday number 10” thing I messed around with today. It wasn’t some grand project, just a little coding exercise to keep the brain from turning to mush, ya know?

So, where did I even start? Well, the idea was simple: I wanted to write a script that could figure out all the possible ways to represent a given number (let’s say 10, because, well, the title) as the sum of positive integers. Like, 1 + 9, 2 + 8, 1 + 1 + 8, you get the picture.

First thing I did was fire up my trusty code editor. I’m a Python guy, so that’s what I used. I started by defining a function, something like find_sums(target, current_sum, current_list). “Target” is the number we want to add up to (10 in our case), “current_sum” keeps track of the sum we’ve got so far, and “current_list” stores the numbers we’ve used to get to that sum.

The core logic was recursion, baby! I mean, that’s usually how these things shake out. The function basically does this:

• If current_sum equals target, then we’ve found a valid combination, so we print current_list (or store it somewhere, whatever).
• If current_sum is greater than target, then this combination is a bust, so we bail out.
• Otherwise, we loop through numbers from 1 up to target. For each number, we call find_sums again, but this time we add that number to current_sum and append it to current_list.

Now, debugging…oh boy. My first attempt was a complete mess. Infinite loops, repeated combinations…the whole shebang. I ended up spending a good hour just tracing the execution flow with print statements. Seriously, print statements are your best friend when you’re trying to figure out why your code is acting like a drunk monkey.

The biggest snag I ran into was avoiding duplicate combinations. For example, 1 + 2 + 7 and 2 + 1 + 7 should be considered the same. The way I tackled this was by making sure that the numbers in current_list were always in non-decreasing order. So, when I loop through the possible numbers to add, I only consider numbers that are greater than or equal to the last number in current_list.

After tweaking and testing, I finally got it working! When I ran it with target = 10, it spit out all the possible combinations: 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1, 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+2, and so on. It was a long list, but it was correct!

Is it the most efficient solution ever? Probably not. I’m sure there are more clever ways to do it. But it worked, and it was a fun little brain teaser. Sometimes, you just gotta code something for the heck of it, right?

So yeah, that was my day. Birthday number 10 – solved with a bit of Python and a whole lot of debugging. Later!