When we presented the Y combinator, we said that it was very aesthetic but not so practical.

Today, we are going to show a real life application of the Y combinator: the memoization of a recursive function.

Recursive

The problem

Did you ever try to memoize a recursive function?

At first glance it seems easy, especially in clojure with the memoize function:

(defn factorial [n]
    (print n)
    (if (zero? n)
      1
      (* n (factorial (dec n)))))

(def factorial-memo (memoize factorial))

And indeed subsequent calls to factorial-memo are cached:

(def factorial-memo (memoize factorial))

(with-out-str
  (factorial-memo 6)
  (factorial-memo 6))

The numbers are only printed once.

By the way, all the code snippets of this page are live and interactive powered by the klipse plugin:

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But what happens to subsequent calls with smaller numbers? We’d like them to be cached also. But they are not.

Here is the proof:

(def factorial-memo (memoize factorial))

(with-out-str
  (factorial-memo 6)
    (factorial-memo 5))

The reason is that the code of factorial-memo uses factorial and not factorial-memo.

In clojure, we could modify the code of factorial so that it calls factorial-memo, but it is very very ugly: the code of the recursive function has to be aware of its memoizer!!!

(defn factorial-ugly [n]
  (print n)
    (if (zero? n)
        1
            (* n (factorial-memo-ugly (dec n)))))

(def factorial-memo-ugly (memoize factorial-ugly))

(with-out-str
  (factorial-memo-ugly 6)
    (factorial-memo-ugly 5))

With the Y combinator we can solve this issue with elegance.

The Y combinator for recursive memoization

As we explained here, the Y combinator allows us to generate recursive functions without using any names.

As envisioned by Bruce McAdam in his paper Y in Practical Programs and exposed here by Viksit Gaur, we are going to tweak the code of the Y combinator, so that it receives a wrapper function and apply it before executing the original function. Something like this:

(def Ywrap
  (fn [wrapper-func f]
    ((fn [x]
       (x x))
     (fn [x]
       (f (wrapper-func (fn [y]
                          ((x x) y))))))))

And here is the code for a memo wrapper generator:

(defn memo-wrapper-generator [] 
  (let [hist (atom {})]
    (fn [f]
      (fn [y]
        (if (find @hist y)
          (@hist y)
          (let [res (f y)]
            (swap! hist assoc y res)
            res))))))

It is almost the same code as the clojure memoize.

And now, we are going to build a Y combinator for memoization:

(def Ymemo 
  (fn [f]
      (Ywrap (memo-wrapper-generator) f)))

And here is how we get a memoized recursive factorial function:

(def factorial-gen
  (fn [func]
    (fn [n]
      (println n)
      (if (zero? n)
        1
        (* n (func (dec n)))))))
(def factorial-memo (Ymemo factorial-gen))

And here is the proof that it is memoized properly:

(with-out-str
(factorial-memo 6)
(factorial-memo 5))

Isn’t it elegant?

Fibonacci without exponential complexity

The worst effective implementation (exponential complexity) of the Fibonacci function is the recursive one:

(defn fib [n]
  (if (< n 2) 1
    (+ (fib (- n 1))
       (fib (- n 2)))))

There are a couple of effective implementations for the Fibonacci sequence without using recursion.

Using our Ymemo combinator, one can write an effective recursive implementation if the Fibonnaci sequence:

(defn fib-gen [f]
  (fn [n]
    (if (< n 2) 1
      (+ (f (- n 1))
         (f (- n 2))))))

(def fib-recursive-memo (Ymemo fib-gen))

Let’s compare the performances of the naive recursive version and the memoized recursive:

(We have to redefine fib-recursive-memo, in order to reset the cache each time we re-run the code snippet.)

(def fib-recursive-memo (Ymemo fib-gen))
(def n 35)
(with-out-str
  (time (fib n))
  (time (fib-recursive-memo n)))

On my computer, the memoized one is around 300 times faster!

Please share your thoughts about this really exciting topic…