_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

The Collatz conjecture, named after Lothar Collatz who introduced the idea is a perfect example of a mathematical problem that cannot be solved by mathematics and the tools available within the domain and scope of mathematics of today.

It goes a little like this:

it's a nice little conjecture to turn into a program, so I decided to write it in YASS to try and demonstrate this based on the above syntax:

function f ($n)

  if($n % 2 == 0)
    $n = $n / 2
  else
    $n = ($n * 3) + 1
  end if

  return $n

end function

$n = input("Please insert a start number")

$iterations = 0
print($n)
while($n != 0 and $iterations < 5)
  
  $n = f($n)

  print($n)
  if($n == 1)
    $iterations++
  end if
end while