>take a CS class
>suddenly there's a Fibonnaci sequence
Recursion aside why is the Fibonacci sequence so important in CS? There isn't a single class I've been in where we don't end up discussing it.
CS Theory
Grayson Hall
James Miller
It's a very simple recursive function that can be used as an example to teach you recursion and optimizing recursive algorithms.
Luis Robinson
It's not important at all, it's just convenient for examples.
Kevin Foster
This
Nathan Rivera
Damn. I was hoping for something a little deeper
Justin Phillips
>why is the Fibonacci sequence so important in CS
It's not that it's important, it's a pertinent mathematical property. In particular, it plays a role in prime numbers, as well as a key part in NP-completeness. I've said too much.
Colton James
seeing as you didn't even realise that fact on your own, you're a no hoper
Gavin Harris
> I've said too much.
what did he mean by this? are (((they))) using Fibnoacci Numbers?
Leo Brown
...
Jackson Gomez
Recursion is shit stop using it
Tyler Edwards
Brainlet here, is recursion ever a useful tool (outside Academia)?
Lucas Harris
Makes a lot of algorithms more readable than their iterative counterparts
Joseph Howard
t. freshman dropout
It appears at least twice in any decent numerical analysis course.
Jose Edwards
Depending on your field and type of problem.
Some graph traversal algorithms are stupid simple with recursion
Elijah Anderson
Because it's the debian logo and debian is the best os
David Hernandez
Lol, we were covering it in computer architecture
It's way more fun when you're fucking with memory directly
Charles Wright
Maybe you need to learn to program better.
Xavier Rogers
What's the difference between recursion and loop?
Owen Thomas
Recursion: when a function keeps calling itself. Easily understandable but a bitch to debug and very hard on resources - might cause a stack overflow. Generally a bad idea, only good in a very few cases (like directory traversal). Most common example is calculating factorials.
Loop: do something n times (for) or keep repeating until a condition is met (while) or keep repeating until a condition is met, but do it at least once (do while).
Hope it helps.
Elijah Morris
It's to teach recursion. Also don't use recursion it's shit.
Noah Foster
>Easily understandable but a bitch to debug and very hard on resources - might cause a stack overflow. Generally a bad idea, only good in a very few cases (like directory traversal).
Get a better compiler.
Recusrive programming is by far the norm in functional programming, where the compiled result ends up being iterative and a single stack frame.
This means having all of the immutability, abstraction, and reasonability of recursive programming, but none of the stack frame overhead.
Owen Collins
Recursion is useful in cases where on each iteration of your code, your code has to maintain information in a stack. The advantage of recursion is that the function call stack maintains that information stack for you. For example, if you implemented the normal recursive version of quicksort with only iteration, you would need to keep track of which start and end indexes to scope your sort in on each iteration.
Joseph Perry
Read this as "your code has to suck cock"
Hahaha.
>cs majors know less about cs theory than math majors
David Clark
Fibonacci Sequence is also related to the Golden Ratio. The Golden ratio has been found to be aesthetically pleasing, for instance the dimensions of a postcard are designed with the golden ratio, buildings also. Plus Da Vinci designed that picture of the human man with the golden ratio in mind
en.wikipedia.org
Isaiah James
Plus then theres the golden spiral, and this is found in nature, such as snails shell, plus the fib sequence describes how sunflower seeds are arranged int the flower head
momath.org
James Wright
Absolutely. Recursion lets you call a function multiple times in different contexts without using a separate iteration construct (such as a for loop). This often makes for much more elegant code than you'd get otherwise.
Recursion is also great for iterating over graphs, and basically all data structures can be thought of as graphs.
Bentley Kelly
Financial guys use it to predict how far a stock price will fall
Austin Scott
A Fibonacci sequence is just a geometric sequence that's trying to be fancy.
Geometric sequences come up all the time.
Carter Murphy
No I knew it's an easy example which is why I said in the OP recursion aside. I just hoped someone would blow my mind with something about Fibonnaci
Alexander Rivera
>Fibonacci Sequence is also related to the Golden Ratio.
Yes. I took a CS Theory class once, and our Professor showed us a formula for calculating the nth Fibonacci number using integer division with the golden ratio formula.
Landon Lewis
I think I've seen it being used in compression or cryptography before but that's it.
Christopher Richardson
There are some problems that are a nightmare to solve without recursion like tower of hanoi?