#4

I thought I'd join the Euler problem bandwagon. In true mechanical engineering fashion, I'm using Matlab to solve them. Actually, just for an added twist, I'm using Octave, an open source math interpreter that is mostly compatible with Matlab, on my dog-slow Mac notebook, forcing me to not use brute-force approaches if they can be avoided.

I had already seen solutions to problems 1-3, so I started with 4.  So here goes:

function euler4

max_result = 0;
for ii = 999:-1:100
  for jj = 999:-1:100

    % Don't bother to check if this number is smaller than the max found
    result = ii*jj;
    if (result < max_result)
      continue;
    end
      
    % Check for palindrome
    result_string = int2str(result);
    success = 1;
    rlength = length(result_string);
    for kk = 1:rlength/2
      if result_string(kk) ~= result_string(rlength-kk+1)
        success = 0;
        break;
      end
    end
    if success && result > max_result
      max_result = result;
    end
    
  end
end
max_result 

Not pretty, but it gets the job done.