Recursion Formula for Integer Partitions

Question

I have written the following code for evaluating integer partitions using the recurrence formula involving pentagonal numbers:

def part(n):
    p = 0
    if n == 0:
        p += 1
    else:
        k = 1
        while ((n >= (k*(3*k-1)/2)) or (n >= (k*(3*k+1)/2))):
            i = (k * (3*k-1)/2)
            j = (k * (3*k+1)/2)
            if ((n-i) >= 0):
                p -= ((-1)**k) * part(n-i)
            if ((n-j) >= 0):
                p -= ((-1)**k) * part(n-j)
            k += 1
    return p

    n = int(raw_input("Enter a number: "))
    m = part(n)
    print m

The code works fine up until n=29. It gets a bit slow around n=24, but I still get an output within a decent runtime. I know the algorithm is correct because the numbers yielded are in accordance with known values.

For numbers above 35, I don't get an output even after waiting for a long time (about 30 minutes). I was under the impression that python can handle numbers much larger than the numbers used here. Can someone help me improve my runtime and get better results? Also, if there is something wrong with the code, please let me know.

Answer 1

You can use Memoization:

def memo(f):
    mem = {}
    def wrap(x):
        if x not in mem:
            mem[x] = f(x)
        return mem[x]
    return wrap

@memo
def part(n):
    p = 0
    if n == 0:
        p += 1
    else:
        k = 1
        while (n >= (k * (3 * k - 1) // 2)) or (n >= (k * (3 * k + 1) // 2)):
            i = (k * (3 * k - 1) // 2)
            j = (k * (3 * k + 1) // 2)
            if (n - i) >= 0:
                p -= ((-1) ** k) * part(n - i)
            if (n - j) >= 0:
                p -= ((-1) ** k) * part(n - j)
            k += 1
    return p

Demo:

In [9]: part(10)
Out[9]: 42

In [10]: part(20)
Out[10]: 627

In [11]: part(29)
Out[11]: 4565

In [12]: part(100)
Out[12]: 190569292

With memoization we remember previous calculation so for repeated calculations we just do a lookup in the dict.