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A common algorithm design tactic is to divide a problem into sub-problems of the same type as the original, solve those sub-problems, and combine the results. This is often referred to as the divide-and-conquer method; when combined with a lookup table that stores the results of previously solved sub-problems (to avoid solving them repeatedly and incurring extra computation time), it can be ...
A recursive step — a set of rules that reduces all successive cases toward the base case. For example, the following is a recursive definition of a person's ancestor. One's ancestor is either: One's parent (base case), or; One's parent's ancestor (recursive step). The Fibonacci sequence is another classic example of recursion: Fib(0) = 0 as ...
Turtle graphics are often associated with the Logo programming language. [2] Seymour Papert added support for turtle graphics to Logo in the late 1960s to support his version of the turtle robot, a simple robot controlled from the user's workstation that is designed to carry out the drawing functions assigned to it using a small retractable pen set into or attached to the robot's body.
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...
In computer programming languages, a recursive data type (also known as a recursively-defined, inductively-defined or inductive data type) is a data type for values that may contain other values of the same type. Data of recursive types are usually viewed as directed graphs [citation needed].
The following example is in the language Java, and shows how the contents of a tree of nodes (in this case describing the components of a car) can be printed. Instead of creating print methods for each node subclass ( Wheel , Engine , Body , and Car ), one visitor class ( CarElementPrintVisitor ) performs the required printing action.
As mentioned above, the Tower of Hanoi is popular for teaching recursive algorithms to beginning programming students. A pictorial version of this puzzle is programmed into the emacs editor, accessed by typing M-x hanoi. There is also a sample algorithm written in Prolog. [citation needed]
The classic example of recursion is in list-sorting algorithms, such as merge sort. The merge sort recursive algorithm will first repeatedly divide the list into consecutive pairs; each pair is then ordered, then each consecutive pair of pairs, and so forth until the elements of the list are in the desired order.