This week's Perl Weekly Challenge touched on prime number sequences again, and some old-school cryptography (which was pretty exciting). This post is divided into two parts, one for each challenge. Find part 2 on dev.to or my blog on Github Pages.

Challenge 1

Write a script to generate first 10 strong and weak prime numbers.
For example, the *n*th prime number is represented by p(n).

p(1) = 2
p(2) = 3
p(3) = 5
p(4) = 7
p(5) = 11

Strong Prime number p(n) when p(n) > [ p(n-1) + p(n+1) ] / 2
Weak Prime number p(n) when p(n) < [ p(n-1) + p(n+1) ] / 2

Thanks to a previous challenge, I already had some code to generate prime numbers. However, that code only allowed me to iterate through a sequence, generating the next prime each time the iterator was called. This challenge requires either storing all of the values of the sequence, or quickly regenerating them, so that more than one value in the sequence can be tested.

Strong and weak prime numbers are defined by how close they are to their immediate neighbors in the sequence of prime numbers: strong primes are closer to the next number in the sequence, while weak primes are closer to the preceeding number (see the formulae above).

On my first attempt, I chose to generate the numbers on each strong/weak check. I used the Memoize module so that this wouldn't be too expensive, time-wise:

use v5.24;
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw(say state signatures);
no warnings "experimental::signatures";
use Memoize;
use List::Util qw(first);

memoize('prime_gen');

sub is_prime {
    my $n = shift;

    return 0 if grep { $n % $_ == 0 } ( 2 .. sqrt($n) );

    return 1;
}

sub prime_iterator {
    my $n = 1;
    return sub {
        1 until is_prime ++$n;
        return $n;
        }
}

sub prime_gen ($n) {
    my $prime_iter = prime_iterator();

    # Throw away the first n-1 values
    $prime_iter->() for (1 .. ($n-1));
    return $prime_iter->();
}

sub is_strong_prime ($n) {
    return ($n > 1) && prime_gen($n) > ((prime_gen($n-1)+prime_gen($n+1))/2);
}

sub strong_prime_gen ($n) {
    my @strong_primes;
    my $i = 1;

    while (@strong_primes < $n) {
        my $p = prime_gen($i);
        push @strong_primes, $p if is_strong_prime($i);
        $i++;
    }

    return pop @strong_primes;
}

sub is_weak_prime ($n) {
    return ($n > 1) && prime_gen($n) < ((prime_gen($n-1)+prime_gen($n+1))/2);
}

sub weak_prime_gen ($n) {
    my @weak_primes;
    my $i = 1;

    while (@weak_primes < $n) {
        my $p = prime_gen($i);
        push @weak_primes, $p if is_weak_prime($i);
        $i++;
    }

    return pop @weak_primes;
}

say "Strong primes: ", join(", ", map {strong_prime_gen($_)} (1 .. 10));
say "Weak primes: ", join(", ", map {weak_prime_gen($_)} (1 .. 10));

Basically, I would call the (strong|weak)_prime_gen functions with the index of the prime I wanted in the sequence. Those functions call things like the prime number generating function prime_gen, and another function which checks if the number is in fact strong or weak. Those checking functions ALSO made calls to the prime_gen function, so I memoized it. As I was writing it, I thought I was being pretty clever...

However, it's pretty clear there are a bunch of issues here. First, while it is nice to clearly separate things and then put them all together exactly how you might need them, a lot of this code could just be merged together -- it's not going to be reused elsewhere. Also, the (strong|weak)_prime_gen functions look really similar. The only difference is the direction of the inequality check which was hidden away in that separate checking function. Lastly, this wastes time iterating over the same prime numbers twice, since first I call the strong_prime_gen function and then the weak_prime_gen function.

I could just iterate over a sequence of prime numbers, all the while making both necessary checks above, and storing the numbers I want to keep in the appropriate lists. I could also have a list of prime numbers since I need those anyway. These are all just ints, and for the challenge I know I only need 10 strong/weak primes anyway, so I don't mind the space trade-off.

So now I just need to consider the cases. As I iterate through the primes, I need to make the inequality checks above. I know I need to have at least 3 elements in my prime numbers sequence to even make such a comparison, so we'll account for that (maybe an if (@primes > 2) or something). Next, is the result of the comparison. A prime can either be greater than (strong), less than (weak) or equal to (balanced) the mean of its immediate neighbors. Hm...sounds a lot like comparisons made using the <=> or cmp operators, which return 1, -1, or 0, respectively, for each of those cases.

sub is_prime ($n) {
    return 0 if grep { $n % $_ == 0 } ( 2 .. sqrt($n) );

    return 1;
}

sub prime_iterator {
    my $n = 1;
    return sub {
        1 until is_prime ++$n;
        return $n;
    }
}

my ( @primes, @strong_primes, @weak_primes, @bal_primes );
my @which_arr = ( \@bal_primes, \@strong_primes, \@weak_primes );
my $iter      = prime_iterator();
my $n         = 10;

while ( ( @strong_primes < $n ) || ( @weak_primes < $n ) ) {
    push @primes, $iter->();
    if ( @primes > 2 ) {
        push $which_arr[ ( $primes[-2] <=> ( $primes[-3] + $primes[-1] ) / 2 )
        ]->@*, $primes[-2];
    }
}

say "First 10 weak primes: " . join( ", ", @weak_primes );
say "First 10 strong primes: " . join( ", ", @strong_primes );

Oh this is much better: far less code, far less repetition, and I don't even need to memoize. I took advantage of the return value of <=> by making a list of the references to the lists I needed, which I called @which_arr. The order is important, because I'm using the return value of <=> as an index into that array, so a -1 (less than) result means that the value should go into the @weak_primes array, which means that the reference to it needs to be the last element of the array. That may be counterintuitive at first, but a -1 index is the same as the last index since negative indices start from the end of the array.

Also probably counterintuitive is that the value we save is not the last value in the @primes sequence, but the second-to-last value, $primes[-2] since that is the last value which can have both to an immediately preceding and an immediately succeeding value.

See the full solution, here.