Ruby Fibonacci algorithm

Question

The following is a method I wrote to calculate a value in the Fibonacci sequence:

def fib(n)

    if n == 0
        return 0
    end
    if n == 1
        return 1
    end

    if n >= 2
        return fib(n-1) + (fib(n-2))
    end

end

It works uptil n = 14, but after that I get a message saying the program is taking too long to respond (I'm using repl.it). Anyone know why this is happening?

Answer 1

Naive fibonacci makes a lot of repeat calculations - in fib(14) fib(4) is calculated many times.

You can add memoization to your algorithm to make it a lot faster:

def fib(n, memo = {})
  if n == 0 || n == 1
    return n
  end
  memo[n] ||= fib(n-1, memo) + fib(n-2, memo)
end
fib 14
# => 377
fib 24
# => 46368
fib 124
# => 36726740705505779255899443

Answer 2

As others have pointed out, your implementation's run time grows exponentially in n. There are much cleaner implementations.

Constructive [O(n) run time, O(1) storage]:

def fib(n)
  raise "fib not defined for negative numbers" if n < 0
  new, old = 1, 0
  n.times {new, old = new + old, new}
  old
end

Memoized recursion [O(n) run time, O(n) storage]:

def fib_memo(n, memo)
  memo[n] ||= fib_memo(n-1, memo) + fib_memo(n-2, memo)
end

def fib(n)
  raise "fib not defined for negative numbers" if n < 0
  fib_memo(n, [0, 1])
end

Recursive powers of a matrix multiplication using squared halving of the power for when you just gotta know really big factorials like 1_000_000.fib [O(log n) run time and storage (on stack)]:

def matrix_fib(n)
  if n == 1
    [0,1]
  else
    f = matrix_fib(n/2)
    c = f[0] * f[0] + f[1] * f[1]
    d = f[1] * (f[1] + 2 * f[0])
    n.even? ? [c,d] : [d,c+d]
  end
end

def fib(n)
  raise "fib not defined for negative numbers" if n < 0
  n.zero? ? n : matrix_fib(n)[1]
end