log-sum-exp trick why not recursive

Question

I have been researching the log-sum-exp problem. I have a list of numbers stored as logarithms which I would like to sum and store in a logarithm.

the naive algorith

Answer 1

As you have defined it, your recursive function will never terminate. That's because ((x-maxlog) for x in listOfLogs) still has the same number of elements as listOfLogs.

I don't think that this is easily fixable either, without significantly impacting either the performance or the precision (compared to the non-recursive version).