Programming Praxis

Over at NumberPhile, Matt and Brady are talking about multiplicative persistance:

Take a number. Multiply all its digits together. Repeat with the new number until it reaches a single digit. For instance, starting from 327, the product of the digits 3, 2 and 7 is 42, then recurring with 42 the product of the digits 4 and 2 is 8, which is the final answer; we say the sequence 327 → 42 → 8 finishes in 2 steps. What number leads to a sequence with the maximal number of steps?

The video includes some live-coding in Python by Matt.

Your task is to implement a function to compute the multiplicative persistance sequence starting from a given number, then “play with it” as Matt suggests. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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