large factorials
You don't say what the error was, for the R factorial function, but it is probably irrelevant for your question. Factorials get to be big numbers rather quickly and unless you are using a program that does arbitrary precission arithmetic you will quickly exceed the precission limits, for storing a number. If you have Maple, do 170! and count the number of digits in the result. You will see what I mean. There are some tricks when working with large factorials, depending on what you are doing with them. I'd first try the log factorial function in R I think its called lfactorial. Just do a ?factorial and you'll find documentation. If this doesn't work, for you, repost with a clear description of what you're trying to do and someone may be able to help. Murray M Cooper, Ph.D. Richland Statistics 9800 N 24th St Richland, MI, USA 49083 Mail: richstat at earthlink.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "molinar" <sky2k2 at hotmail.com> To: <r-help at r-project.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:21 PM Subject: [R] large factorials
I am working on a project that requires me to do very large factorial evaluations. On R the built in factorial function and the one I created both are not able to do factorials over 170. The first gives an error and mine return Inf. Is there a way to have R do these larger calculations (the calculator in accessories can do 10000 factorial and Maple can do even larger) -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/large-factorials-tp23175816p23175816.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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