Fibsonicci

Source code for all of the implementations in my video One second to compute the largest Fibonacci number I can. The video is a hard prerequisite to coming here and making fun of my code.

Usage

After cloning the repo, make sure to run

make init

to initialise the output folders before trying to build anything specific.

Computing one Fibonacci number

To compute a specific Fibonacci number using one of the given implementations, use

make bin/one_$(algo).O3.out
./bin/one_$(algo).O3.out

If you are only interested in the computation time, run

make clean-bin # or just ensure that ./bin/one_$(algo) doesn't exist
make FLAGS="-DPERF" one_$(algo)

Full expansion

By default, the output will be in scientific notation (with an option to fully expand). However, since Fibonacci numbers are encoded in a dyadic base, the expansion in decimal is achieved with a very lazily-implemented $O(n^2)$ double-dabble, so can be very slow if the result has a large number of digits. If you really want to verify the correctness of the output, then run

make clean-bin # or just ensure that ./bin/one_$(algo) doesn't exist
make FLAGS="-DCHECK" one_$(algo)

Then, the outputs will be in hexadecimal, and fully-expanded.

Generating runtime plots

Note. The runtime generator (in particular, its attempt to find the maximum Fibonacci number computable by a given algorithm within 1 second) is highly nonscientific and inaccurate. I made no effort to ensure that the data from the video is perfectly replicable!

To generate the data for all algorithms, simply run

make all-data

Algorithms

Large numbers are encoded as base-$2^L$ unsigned integers (using vectors), where $L$ depends on the algorithm of choice. This project includes the following implementations:

Algorithm	Runtime	Digit size ($2^L$)
Naive	$\Omega(\exp(n))$	$2^{64}$
"Linear"	$O(n^2)$	$2^{64}$
Simple matrix multiplication	$O(n^2)$	$2^{32}$
Fast exponentiation	$O(n^2)$	$2^{32}$
Strassen matrix multiplication	$O(n^2)$	$2^{32}$
Karatsuba multiplication	$O(n^{1.585})$	$2^{32}$
DFT	$O(n^2)$1	$2^8$
FFT	$O(n\log n)$1	$2^8$
Binet formula	$O(n\log n)$1	$2^8$

Naive

The "naïve" implementation is just the simple (non-memoised) recursive algorithm, and can be found in impl/naive.cpp.

Linear

The "linear" implementation is the direct non-recursive implementation. Of course, the algorithm is not actually linear; the runtime is $O(n^2)$.

Simple matrix multiplication

Naïve implementation based on the identity

$$\begin{bmatrix} F_n \\ F_{n+1} \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 1 \end{bmatrix}^n \begin{bmatrix} 0 \\ 1 \end{bmatrix}$$

Fast exponentiation

This implementation improves on the simpler variant above by using the $O(\log n)$ fast exponentiation algorithm.

Strassen matrix multiplication

This implementation modifies the fast exponentiation algorithm to use Strassen's matrix multiplication algorithm, which reduces the number of integer multiplications down from $8$ to $7$.

This modification was not mentioned in the video, since it leads to minimal improvement over naïve matrix multiplication (it would be a different story if matrices were larger than $2\times2$).

Karatsuba multiplication

This implementation enhances the fast exponentiation algorithm by replacing the naïve grade-school integer multiplication algorithm with Karatsuba's $O(n^{\log_23})$ algorithm.

Note, however, that my implementation doesn't lead to any noticeable results until $n\gg0$ (you can definitely feel it when $n\geq2^{24}$).

DFT

This implementation takes the fast exponentiation algorithm and replaces its grade-school integer multiplication with integer multiplication based on the discrete Fourier transform.

The transform is over the field of complex numbers, which are represented with pairs of double-precision floating-point numbers, so the algorithm's correctness is limited by this. (I was too lazy to implement custom-precision floats.)

FFT

This improves the DFT algorithm with the Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform. Of course, this suffers from the same precision limitation.

Binet formula

Finally deviating from the matrix multiplication algorithms above, this algorithm is based on Binet's formula

$$F_n = \frac{\varphi^n - (-\varphi)^{-n}}{\sqrt5}$$

(where $\varphi$ is the golden ratio).

More precisely, we compute the coefficient of $\sqrt5$ in the expansion of $\varphi^n$ in the ring of integers of $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt5)$. Note that this computation can really be done in $\mathbb{N}[\sqrt5]$---and it is.

Large integer multiplication is achieved with FFTs, so suffers from the same precision limitation as the previous two algorithms.

Footnotes

1. These algorithms eventually fail (due to exceeding floating-point precision) when n is sufficiently large (e.g., fails when n >= 0x7f'ffff). ↩ ↩² ↩³