Smallest Common multiple - doesn't pass all tests

JavaScript
1

Hello community,

Need help understanding this assignment I’ve spent so much time on this. I don’t know why I’m not getting it. It’s discouraging. Although I looked at the answers on the FreeCodeCamp, I still don’t seem to get it right. It says I can run on an infinite loop when passing the last test. Any help is much appreciated!


function smallestCommons(arr) {
 let sortNums = arr.sort((a,b)=> a-b);
 let smallNum = sortNums[0];
 let bigNum = sortNums[1];
 //let newArr=[];
/* while(smallNum <= bigNum){
   newArr.push(smallNum);
   smallNum++;
 }*/
  let scm = bigNum;
   
  while(true){
    let conditionIs = true;
      for(let i= smallNum; i <= bigNum; i++){
       if(scm % i !==0){
         conditionIs = false;
         break;
         }    
       } 
    if (conditionIs){
      return scm;
    } else {
      scm++;
    }
    
 }
}


console.log(smallestCommons([1,13]));

   **Your browser information:**

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

Challenge: Smallest Common Multiple

Link to the challenge:

2

This is a big red flag that you’ve designed slow code.

You can somewhat improve your code by increasing scm by a much better value than 1.

This is a hard challenge. I recommend people look up algorithms on Wikipedia for this challenge.

1 Like
3

You are right. I did sense using

while(true)

was not the best approach. I just didn’t know what else to do. I will continue to work on this. Thanks for your feedback!

4

Changing this line

Will make your code faster.

But, I still recommend putting a condition in the while loop. What number is guaranteed to be a multiple of every number in the range?

1 Like
5

I think the number that is guaranteed to be multiple of every number is the highest of the two numbers we are provided in the array.
Thanks much @JeremyLT

6

I don’t think that works? If you have [4, 6], the SCM is 60, which is bigger than 6. But what about 4 * 5 * 6?

1 Like
7

thanks for this. Great point… I’m just not sure if this would always be true.
[1,4] the scm would be 12 and not 24 no?

8

I’m just saying that the SCM can’t be bigger that the product of all numbers in the range, which lets you remove the while true.

1 Like
9

true true true. Thanks a lot for this!!

1 Like
10

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