We covered this in class today. I understand the mechanics of it, but aside from being a nice example of recursion does it serve any purpose? Searching the web reveals lots of pages with the formula and it's implementation in code, some talk about the author, but nothing about it's purpose.
What is the TAK function for?
algorithms;recursion
You might use it to evaluate the performance of programming languages:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tak_%28function%29since recursive methods are pretty useful for benchmarking. In particular, deep recursion tests the speed with which a language can make method calls. This is important because modern applications have a tendency to spend much of their time calling various API functions.You will also need it to solve ballot problems like this one:Suppose A and B are candidates for office and there are 2n voters, nvoting for A and n for B. In how many ways can the ballots be countedso that B is never ahead of A?http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BallotProblem.htmlor just to generate Takeuchi Numbers: 0, 1, 4, 14, 53, 223, 1034, 5221, 28437, ... 