Project Euler #8 in Python

Question

Find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number:

import time

num = '\
73167176531330624919225119674426574742355349194934\
96983520312774506326239578318016984801869478851843\
85861560789112949495459501737958331952853208805511\
12540698747158523863050715693290963295227443043557\
66896648950445244523161731856403098711121722383113\
62229893423380308135336276614282806444486645238749\
30358907296290491560440772390713810515859307960866\
70172427121883998797908792274921901699720888093776\
65727333001053367881220235421809751254540594752243\
52584907711670556013604839586446706324415722155397\
53697817977846174064955149290862569321978468622482\
83972241375657056057490261407972968652414535100474\
82166370484403199890008895243450658541227588666881\
16427171479924442928230863465674813919123162824586\
17866458359124566529476545682848912883142607690042\
24219022671055626321111109370544217506941658960408\
07198403850962455444362981230987879927244284909188\
84580156166097919133875499200524063689912560717606\
05886116467109405077541002256983155200055935729725\
71636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450'

biggest = 0
i = 1
while i < len(num):
    one = int(num[i]) 
    two = int(num[i+1])  
    thr = int(num[i+2]) 
    fou = int(num[i+3])
    fiv = int(num[i+4])
    product = one*two*thr*fou*fiv
    if product > biggest:
        biggest = product
    i += i+1 
 print(product)

 start = time.time()
 elapsed = (time.time() - start)
 print("This code took: " + str(elapsed) + " seconds")

This code gives me an answer of 7054, much too low, and should calculate many products along the way, but only calculates 9 of them. My question is: What is causing my code to deviate from its intended purpose and also, how can I optimize the part of the code calculating "one", "two", etc. in order to calculate the product?

Answer 1

There were several issues.

1. You were printing product not biggest. Make sure to print the right variable!

2. You were iterating through the length of the entire string when you should really just iterate in the range [0..len(num) - 4) so that you don't get an IndexError when you do your product calculation.

3. You were incrementing your i variable wrong. You want to increment it by 1 each turn so just do i += 1 or i = i + 1. The code i += i + 1 is equivalent to i = i + i + 1. I don't think you wanted to double i on every iteration of your while loop. :)

4. Sequences are 0-indexed in Python. This means when you are iterating through a set of indices, the first element is always at seq[0] and the elements continue until seq[n-1]. Therefore you should start your i variable at 0, not 1!

5. You were not measuring your time correctly. You want to have your start time be assigned to before all your code executes so that you can correctly measure elapsed time.

Here is your fixed code:

'''
Find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number
'''

import time
start = time.time()

num = '\
73167176531330624919225119674426574742355349194934\
96983520312774506326239578318016984801869478851843\
85861560789112949495459501737958331952853208805511\
12540698747158523863050715693290963295227443043557\
66896648950445244523161731856403098711121722383113\
62229893423380308135336276614282806444486645238749\
30358907296290491560440772390713810515859307960866\
70172427121883998797908792274921901699720888093776\
65727333001053367881220235421809751254540594752243\
52584907711670556013604839586446706324415722155397\
53697817977846174064955149290862569321978468622482\
83972241375657056057490261407972968652414535100474\
82166370484403199890008895243450658541227588666881\
16427171479924442928230863465674813919123162824586\
17866458359124566529476545682848912883142607690042\
24219022671055626321111109370544217506941658960408\
07198403850962455444362981230987879927244284909188\
84580156166097919133875499200524063689912560717606\
05886116467109405077541002256983155200055935729725\
71636269561882670428252483600823257530420752963450'

biggest = 0
i = 0
while i < len(num) - 4:
    one = int(num[i]) 
    two = int(num[i+1])  
    thr = int(num[i+2]) 
    fou = int(num[i+3])
    fiv = int(num[i+4])
    product = one*two*thr*fou*fiv
    if product > biggest:
        biggest = product
    i = i + 1 
print(biggest)

elapsed = (time.time() - start)
print("This code took: " + str(elapsed) + " seconds")