Habitually Good

My recent attempts at playing the Google Treasure Hunt found me looking for ways to work with very large numbers. My solution to the first puzzle was consistently giving me the wrong answer. After a while I stopped looking at my solution for mistakes and started looking at the answer closely; it turned out that Excel (which is what I was using to generate my answers) lost precision working with very large numbers. Well, I decided to write a program in C# for this and it turned out that even here, we lost precision (and I guess that should have been expected).

Rather than write my own class which can manipulate large numbers, I decided to see if there is anything already available. Well, there is.

One would think that the .Net framework would offer something that allows manipulation of such numbers, and the plan for offering something is there in the form of a .Net class called System.Numeric.BigInteger. However, as of release of version 3.5 of the framework, this class is Internal and can’t be used. So how do I work with numbers like the one below?

Enter Open Source and a project called IntX. IntX is an integer representation written in C# which allows you to work with integers of very large size (over a million digits). This makes the number above fairly small. Kudos to the developer for making this and then making it public.

Incidentally, this was my ‘correct’ answer for Google Treasure Hunt’s first puzzle :).

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