►zthomae’s SICP solutions
▼3 Chapter 3
3.1 Exercise 3.1
3.2 Exercise 3.2
3.3 Exercise 3.3
3.4 Exercise 3.4
3.5 Exercise 3.5
3.6 Exercise 3.6
3.7 Exercise 3.7
3.8 Exercise 3.8
3.9 Exercise 3.9
3.10 Exercise 3.10
3.11 Exercise 3.11
3.12 Exercise 3.12
3.13 Exercise 3.13
3.14 Exercise 3.14
3.15 Exercise 3.15
3.16 Exercise 3.16
3.17 Exercise 3.17
3.18 Exercise 3.18
3.19 Exercise 3.19
3.20 Exercise 3.20
3.21 Exercise 3.21
3.22 Exercise 3.22
3.23 Exercise 3.23
3.24 Exercise 3.24
3.25 Exercise 3.25
3.26 Exercise 3.26
3.27 Exercise 3.27
3.28 Exercise 3.28
3.29 Exercise 3.29
3.30 Exercise 3.30
3.31 Exercise 3.31
3.32 Exercise 3.32
3.33 Exercise 3.33
3.34 Exercise 3.34
3.35 Exercise 3.35
3.36 Exercise 3.36
3.37 Exercise 3.37
3.38 Exercise 3.38
3.39 Exercise 3.39
3.40 Exercise 3.40
3.41 Exercise 3.41
3.42 Exercise 3.42
3.43 Exercise 3.43
3.44 Exercise 3.44
3.45 Exercise 3.45
3.46 Exercise 3.46
3.47 Exercise 3.47
3.48 Exercise 3.48
3.49 Exercise 3.49
3.50 Exercise 3.50
3.51 Exercise 3.51
3.52 Exercise 3.52
3.53 Exercise 3.53
3.54 Exercise 3.54
3.55 Exercise 3.55
3.56 Exercise 3.56
3.57 Exercise 3.57
3.58 Exercise 3.58
3.59 Exercise 3.59
3.60 Exercise 3.60
3.61 Exercise 3.61
3.62 Exercise 3.62
3.63 Exercise 3.63
3.64 Exercise 3.64
3.65 Exercise 3.65
3.66 Exercise 3.66
3.67 Exercise 3.67
3.68 Exercise 3.68
3.69 Exercise 3.69
3.70 Exercise 3.70
3.71 Exercise 3.71
3.72 Exercise 3.72
3.73 Exercise 3.73
3.74 Exercise 3.74
3.75 Exercise 3.75
3.76 Exercise 3.76
3.77 Exercise 3.77
3.78 Exercise 3.78
3.79 Exercise 3.79
3.80 Exercise 3.80
3.81 Exercise 3.81
3.82 Exercise 3.82
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3.27 Exercise 3.27

memo-fib is called recursively exponentially-many times, but each of these calls will only do real work if the call to lookup doesn’t return a previously-computed result. After it has been computed, it is inserted in the table to be found again. Because all memo-fib calls share the same table, and because new results can be computed from old results in constant time, the overall running time for memo-fib is now linear.

It would not have worked to define memo-fib as (memoize (fib) because the unmemoized fib function would be used to compute results. Only the direct results of calling memo-fib would be stored in the table, so calling ((memoize fib) 3) would only store the result for 3 in the table, and not any of the subproblem results. In other words, the algorithm would no longer be able to run in linear time because it would not be reusing all previously-computed results as you would expect it to.

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