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Project Euler #20 and 100!

December 30th, 2010 No comments

It’s after 2am on the West coast. I am still awake.  As a mental distraction, I’ve been doing working through the problems on Project Euler.  Tonight, in need of a distraction, I started working on Problem 20.

Sum the digits in 100!.  Looking around I couldn’t find much information on factoral values.  They are simple enough in the lower range.

5! = 120 

6! = 720

With that info I can validate that my formula for finding factorals is correct.  Things get a bit sketchier when I asked for 20!  This is what Google spits out:

20 ! = 2.43290201 × 1018

Scientific notation isn’t much help for what I want to do.  I know I’ve got the right values, but it nags at me that I can’t find what I need online.  So, I added a couple more lines to my code to spit out each value in turn.

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