What is the best way to find the period of a (repeating) list in Mathematica?
- by Arnoud Buzing
What is the best way to find the period in a repeating list?
For example:
a = {4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2}
has repeat {4, 5, 1, 2, 3} with the remainder {4, 5, 1, 2} matching, but being incomplete.
The algorithm should be fast enough to handle longer cases, like so:
b = RandomInteger[10000, {100}];
a = Join[b, b, b, b, Take[b, 27]]
The algorithm should return $Failed if there is no repeating pattern like above.
