You might have read my post on the Collatz Conjecture. If you didn’t, you can read it with this link. If you read it, you know I talked about a cool problem called the Collatz Conjecture, and also showed you a piece of code I made. Well, I updated the code, into a library of functions meant for calculating numbers on the Collatz Conjecture. I have the Gist right here:

	class Collatz
	def initialize(num)
	@num = num
	@steps = find_steps(num)
	end
	def steps
	@steps
	end
	def number
	@num
	end
	def find_steps(num)
	counter = 1
	if num <= 0
	raise "This program does not accept negative numbers."
	end
	#checking if it is a float
	unless num.to_i == num
	raise "This program does not accept floats."
	end
	num = num.to_i
	orig_num = num
	loop do
	if num.even?
	num /= 2
	else
	num = 3*num + 1
	end
	if 1 == num
	return counter
	break
	else
	counter += 1
	end
	end
	end
	#static methods
	def self.find_max_steps(limit)
	objs = []
	limit.times do |idx|
	objs << Collatz.new(idx+1)
	end
	#finding max steps
	return objs.max{ |a,b| a.steps <=> b.steps }
	end
	def self.find_smallest_steps(coef)
	idx = 1
	loop do
	collatz = Collatz.new(idx)
	if collatz.steps > coef * idx
	return collatz
	end
	idx += 1
	end
	end
	end
	obj = Collatz.find_max_steps(100)
	puts "it took #{obj.steps} steps to reach from #{obj.number} to 1 which is maximum steps for a number under 100"
	obj = Collatz.find_smallest_steps(3)
	puts "#{obj.number} is the smallest number to have number of steps (#{obj.steps}) more than 3 times the number"

view raw collatz_library.rb hosted with by GitHub

There is a class called Collatz, and inside it 6 methods. The first two are simply for returning variables, nothing cool. The most important method inside it is find_steps, which calculates the amount of steps it takes to get from a certain number to 1. The find_max_steps method sees which number from a range of 1 to the method argument has the most steps. The final method, find_smallest steps, returns the smallest number whose steps are more than itself times the argument.

I’m thinking of posting this as a GitHub project, once I improve it. If you have any suggestions for more methods, or just to increase quality, please write in the comments. Thanks!

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