Finding Munchausen Numbers with Perl

Boy has it been forever since I used Perl for something useful. It's been ages since I used Perl for anything actually. And the local Phoenix Perl Mongers group seems to have dissolved as well. That's too bad, because I really did enjoy going to those talks. But if nobody chips in for those talks the group quickly will die out. Eric Tank can only say so many things about the work he does and the things he knows. I wish I knew more about PDL to give a decent talk about it at a new Perl Mongers group meetings. 

But I digress. Today's blog post is a little blurb about Munchausen numbers. It is stated that in the base 10 number system there are only two known Munchausen numbers. I wrote a small Perl script to see if that was true for the numbers ranging form 1 to 500,000. I don't think I ever got to 500,000 before killing the script, but it was fun at least seeing one of the solutions that everyone already agrees upon. I learned some things about number theory. I would like to understand the proof behind the statement of Munchausen numbers. I currently don't understand it. Finding the Wikipedia article about the curious numbers killed my enthusiasm for the Perl script. Instead I had fun running the GAP script a paper provided into my old Debian Panasonic Toughbook So maybe later today I'll post the crappy Perl script I wrote along with the mysterious and amazing GAP code somebody else wrote. LInks and buttons to come in the near future folks!