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I want to know whether the task explained below is even theoretically possible, and if so how I could do it.
You are given a space of N elements (i.e. all numbers between 0 and N-1.) Let's look at the space of all permutations on that space, and call it S. The ith member of S, which can be marked S[i], is the permutation with the lexicographic number i.
For example, if N is 3, then S is this list of permutations:
S[0]: 0, 1, 2
S[1]: 0, 2, 1
S[2]: 1, 0, 2
S[3]: 1, 2, 0
S[4]: 2, 0, 1
S[5]: 2, 1, 0
(Of course, when looking at a big N, this space becomes very large, N! to be exact.)
Now, I already know how to get the permutation by its index number i, and I already know how to do the reverse (get the lexicographic number of a given permutation.) But I want something better.
Some permutations can be huge by themselves. For example, if you're looking at N=10^20. (The size of S would be (10^20)! which I believe is the biggest number I ever mentioned in a Stack Overflow question :)
If you're looking at just a random permutation on that space, it would be so big that you wouldn't be able to store the whole thing on your harddrive, let alone calculate each one of the items by lexicographic number. What I want is to be able to do item access on that permutation, and also get the index of each item. That is, given N and i to specify a permutation, have one function that takes an index number and find the number that resides in that index, and another function that takes a number and finds in which index it resides. I want to do that in O(1), so I don't need to store or iterate over each member in the permutation.
Crazy, you say? Impossible? That may be. But consider this: A block cipher, like AES, is essentially a permutation, and it almost accomplishes the tasks I outlined above. AES has a block size of 16 bytes, meaning that N is 256^16 which is around 10^38. (The size of S, not that it matters, is a staggering (256^16)!, or around 10^85070591730234615865843651857942052838, which beats my recent record for "biggest number mentioned on Stack Overflow" :)
Each AES encryption key specifies a single permutation on N=256^16. That permutation couldn't be stored whole on your computer, because it has more members than there are atoms in the solar system. But, it allows you item access. By encrypting data using AES, you're looking at the data block by block, and for each block (member of range(N)) you output the encrypted block, which the member of range(N) that is in the index number of the original block in the permutation. And when you're decrypting, you're doing the reverse (Finding the index number of a block.) I believe this is done in O(1), I'm not sure but in any case it's very fast.
The problem with using AES or any other block cipher is that it limits you to very specific N, and it probably only captures a tiny fraction of the possible permutations, while I want to be able to use any N I like, and do item access on any permutation S[i] that I like.
Is it possible to get O(1) item access on a permutation, given size N and permutation number i? If so, how?
(If I'm lucky enough to get code answers here, I'd appreciate if they'll be in Python.)
UPDATE:
Some people pointed out the sad fact that the permutation number itself would be so huge, that just reading the number would make the task non-feasible. Then, I'd like to revise my question: Given access to the factoradic representation of a permutation's lexicographic number, is it possible to get any item in the permutation in O(as small as possible)?
The secret to doing this is to "count in base factorial".
In the same way that 134 = 1*10^2+3*10 + 4, 134 = 5! + 2 * 3! + 2! => 10210 in factorial notation (include 1!, exclude 0!). If you want to represent N!, you will then need N^2 base ten digits. (For each factorial digit N, the maximum number it can hold is N). Up to a bit of confusion about what you call 0, this factorial representation is exactly the lexicographic number of a permutation.
You can use this insight to solve Euler Problem 24 by hand. So I will do that here, and you will see how to solve your problem. We want the millionth permutation of 0-9. In factorial representation we take 1000000 => 26625122. Now to convert that to the permutation, I take my digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and The first number is 2, which is the third (it could be 0), so I select 2 as the first digit, then I have a new list 0,1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and I take the seventh number which is 8 etc, and I get 2783915604.
However, this assumes that you start your lexicographic ordering at 0, if you actually start it at one, you have to subtract 1 from it, which gives 2783915460. Which is indeed the millionth permutation of the numbers 0-9.
You can obviously reverse this procedure, and hence convert backwards and forwards easily between the lexiographic number and the permutation that it represents.
I am not entirely clear what it is that you want to do here, but understanding the above procedure should help. For example, its clear that the lexiographic number represents an ordering which could be used as the key in a hashtable. And you can order numbers by comparing digits left to right so once you have inserted a number you never have to work outs it factorial.
Your question is a bit moot, because your input size for an arbitrary permutation index has size log(N!) (assuming you want to represent all possible permutations) which is Theta(N log N), so if N is really large then just reading the input of the permutation index would take too long, certainly much longer than O(1). It may be possible to store the permutation index in such a way that if you already had it stored, then you could access elements in O(1) time. But probably any such method would be equivalent to just storing the permutation in contiguous memory (which also has Theta(N log N) size), and if you store the permutation directly in memory then the question becomes trivial assuming you can do O(1) memory access. (However you still need to account for the size of the bit encoding of the element, which is O(log N)).
In the spirit of your encryption analogy, perhaps you should specify a small SUBSET of permutations according to some property, and ask if O(1) or O(log N) element access is possible for that small subset.
Edit:
I misunderstood the question, but it was not in waste. My algorithms let me understand: the factoradic representation of a permutation's lexicographic number is almost the same as the permutation itself. In fact the first digit of the factoradic representation is the same as the first element of the corresponding permutation (assuming your space consists of numbers from 0 to N-1). Knowing this there is not really a point in storing the index rather than the permutation itself . To see how to convert the lexicographic number into a permutation, read below.
See also this wikipedia link about Lehmer code.
Original post:
In the S space there are N elements that can fill the first slot, meaning that there are (N-1)! elements that start with 0. So i/(N-1)! is the first element (lets call it 'a'). The subset of S that starts with 0 consists of (N-1)! elements. These are the possible permutations of the set N{a}. Now you can get the second element: its the i(%((N-1)!)/(N-2)!). Repeat the process and you got the permutation.
Reverse is just as simple. Start with i=0. Get the 2nd last element of the permutation. Make a set of the last two elements, and find the element's position in it (its either the 0th element or the 1st), lets call this position j. Then i+=j*2!. Repeat the process (you can start with the last element too, but it will always be the 0th element of the possibilities).
Java-ish pesudo code:
find_by_index(List N, int i){
String str = "";
for(int l = N.length-1; i >= 0; i--){
int pos = i/fact(l);
str += N.get(pos);
N.remove(pos);
i %= fact(l);
}
return str;
}
find_index(String str){
OrderedList N;
int i = 0;
for(int l = str.length-1; l >= 0; l--){
String item = str.charAt(l);
int pos = N.add(item);
i += pos*fact(str.length-l)
}
return i;
}
find_by_index should run in O(n) assuming that N is pre ordered, while find_index is O(n*log(n)) (where n is the size of the N space)
After some research in Wikipedia, I desgined this algorithm:
def getPick(fact_num_list):
"""fact_num_list should be a list with the factorial number representation,
getPick will return a tuple"""
result = [] #Desired pick
#This will hold all the numbers pickable; not actually a set, but a list
#instead
inputset = range(len(fact_num_list))
for fnl in fact_num_list:
result.append(inputset[fnl])
del inputset[fnl] #Make sure we can't pick the number again
return tuple(result)
Obviously, this won't reach O(1) due the factor we need to "pick" every number. Due we do a for loop and thus, assuming all operations are O(1), getPick will run in O(n).
If we need to convert from base 10 to factorial base, this is an aux function:
import math
def base10_baseFactorial(number):
"""Converts a base10 number into a factorial base number. Output is a list
for better handle of units over 36! (after using all 0-9 and A-Z)"""
loop = 1
#Make sure n! <= number
while math.factorial(loop) <= number:
loop += 1
result = []
if not math.factorial(loop) == number:
loop -= 1 #Prevent dividing over a smaller number than denominator
while loop > 0:
denominator = math.factorial(loop)
number, rem = divmod(number, denominator)
result.append(rem)
loop -= 1
result.append(0) #Don't forget to divide to 0! as well!
return result
Again, this will run in O(n) due to the whiles.
Summing all, the best time we can find is O(n).
PS: I'm not a native English speaker, so spelling and phrasing errors may appear. Apologies in advance, and let me know if you can't get around something.
All correct algorithms for accessing the kth item of a permutation stored in factoradic form must read the first k digits. This is because, regardless of the values of the other digits among the first k, it makes a difference whether an unread digit is a 0 or takes on its maximum value. That this is the case can be seen by tracing the canonical correct decoding program in two parallel executions.
For example, if we want to decode the third digit of the permutation 1?0, then for 100, that digit is 0, and for 110, that digit is 2.
Generate all lists of size n, such that each element is between 0 and m (inclusive).
There are (m+1)^n such lists.
There are two easy ways of writing the general case. One is described in the existing answer from #didierc. The alternative is recursion.
For example, think about a method that takes a String as an argument:
if(input string is long enough)
print or store it
else
iterate over digit range
recursive call with the digit appended to the string
This is just like enumerating all the numbers in base (m+1) of n digits.
start with a list of n zeros
do the following loop
yeld the list as a new answer
increment the first element, counting in base (m+1), and propagate the carry recursively on its next element
if there is a carry left, exit the loop
Update:
just for fun, what would be the solution, if we add the restriction that all digits must remain different (like a lottery number, as it was initially stated - and of course we suppose that m >= n) ?
We proceed by enumerating all the numbers with the restriction stated above, and also that any element must be greater than its successor in the list (ie the digit of rank k < n is larger than the digit of rank k+1).
This is implemented by simply checking when computing the carry that the current digit will not become equal to its predecessor, and if so propagate the carry further.
Then, for each list yelded by enumeration, compute all the possible permutations. There are known algorithms to perform that
computation, see for instance the Johnson-Trotter algorithm, but one can build a simpler recursive algorithm:
function select l r:
if the list r is empty, yeld l
else
for each element x of the list r
let l' be the list of x and l
and r' the remaining elements of r
call select l' r'
I saw this post: Finding even numbers in an array and I was thinking about how you could do it without feedback. Here's what I mean.
Given an array of length n containing at most e even numbers and a
function isEven that returns true if the input is even and false
otherwise, write a function that prints all the even numbers in the
array using the fewest number of calls to isEven.
The answer on the post was to use a binary search, which is neat since it doesn't mean the array has to be in order. The number of times you have to check if a number is even is e log n instead if n because you do a binary search (log n) to find one even number each time (e times).
But that idea means that you divide the array in half, test for evenness, then decide which half to keep based on the result.
My question is whether or not you can beat n calls on a fixed testing scheme where you check all the numbers you want for evenness without knowing the outcome, and then figure out where the even numbers are after you've done all the tests based on the results. So I guess it's no-feedback or blind or some term like that.
I was thinking about this for a while and couldn't come up with anything. The binary search idea doesn't work at all with this constraint, but maybe something else does? Even getting down to n/2 calls instead of n (yes, I know they are the same big-O) would be good.
The technical term for "no-feedback or blind" is "non-adaptive". O(e log n) calls still suffice, but the algorithm is rather more involved.
Instead of testing the evenness of products, we're going to test the evenness of sums. Let E ≠ F be distinct subsets of {1, …, n}. If we have one array x1, …, xn with even numbers at positions E and another array y1, …, yn with even numbers at positions F, how many subsets J of {1, …, n} satisfy
(∑i in J xi) mod 2 ≠ (∑i in J yi) mod 2?
The answer is 2n-1. Let i be an index such that xi mod 2 ≠ yi mod 2. Let S be a subset of {1, …, i - 1, i + 1, … n}. Either J = S is a solution or J = S union {i} is a solution, but not both.
For every possible outcome E, we need to make calls that eliminate every other possible outcome F. Suppose we make 2e log n calls at random. For each pair E ≠ F, the probability that we still cannot distinguish E from F is (2n-1/2n)2e log n = n-2e, because there are 2n possible calls and only 2n-1 fail to distinguish. There are at most ne + 1 choices of E and thus at most (ne + 1)ne/2 pairs. By a union bound, the probability that there exists some indistinguishable pair is at most n-2e(ne + 1)ne/2 < 1 (assuming we're looking at an interesting case where e ≥ 1 and n ≥ 2), so there exists a sequence of 2e log n calls that does the job.
Note that, while I've used randomness to show that a good sequence of calls exists, the resulting algorithm is deterministic (and, of course, non-adaptive, because we chose that sequence without knowledge of the outcomes).
You can use the Chinese Remainder Theorem to do this. I'm going to change your notation a bit.
Suppose you have N numbers of which at most E are even. Choose a sequence of distinct prime powers q1,q2,...,qk such that their product is at least N^E, i.e.
qi = pi^ei
where pi is prime and ei > 0 is an integer and
q1 * q2 * ... * qk >= N^E
Now make a bunch of 0-1 matrices. Let Mi be the qi x N matrix where the entry in row r and column c has a 1 if c = r mod qi and a 0 otherwise. For example, if qi = 3^2, then row 2 has ones in columns 2, 11, 20, ... 2 + 9j and 0 elsewhere.
Now stack these matrices vertically to get a Q x N matrix M, where Q = q1 + q2 + ... + qk. The rows of M tell you which numbers to multiply together (the nonzero positions). This gives a total of Q products that you need to test for evenness. Call each row a "trial", and say that a "trial involves j" if the jth column of that row is nonempty. The theorem you need is the following:
THEOREM: The number in position j is even if and only if all trials involving j are even.
So you do a total of Q trials and then look at the results. If you choose the prime powers intelligently, then Q should be significantly smaller than N. There are asymptotic results that show you can always get Q on the order of
(2E log N)^2 / 2log(2E log N)
This theorem is actually a corollary of the Chinese Remainder Theorem. The only place that I've seen this used is in Combinatorial Group Testing. Apparently the problem originally arose when testing soldiers coming back from WWII for syphilis.
The problem you are facing is a form of group testing, type of a problem with the objective of reducing the cost of identifying certain elements of a set (up to d elements of a set of N elements).
As you've already stated, there are two basic principles via which the testing may be carried out:
Non-adaptive Group Testing, where all the tests to be performed are decided a priori.
Adaptive Group Testing, where we perform several tests, basing each test on the outcome of previous tests. Obviously, adaptive testing has a potential to reduce the cost, compared to non-adaptive testing.
Theoretical bounds for both principles have been studied, and are available in this Wiki article, or this paper.
For adaptive testing, the upper bound is O(d*log(N)) (as already described in this answer).
For non-adaptive testing, it can be shown that the upper bound is O(d*d/log(d)*log(N)), which is obviously larger than the upper bound for adaptive testing by a factor of d/log(d).
This upper bound for non-adaptive testing comes from an algorithm which uses disjunct matrices: matrices of dimension T x N ("number of tests" x "number of elements"), where each item can be either true (if an element was included in a test), or false (if it wasn't), with a property that any subset of d columns must differ from all other columns by at least a single row (test inclusion). This allows linear time of decoding (there are also "d-separable" matrices where fewer test are needed, but the time complexity for their decoding is exponential and not computationaly feasible).
Conclusion:
My question is whether or not you can beat n calls on a fixed testing scheme [...]
For such a scheme and a sufficiently large value of N, a disjunct matrix can be constructed which would have less than K * [d*d/log(d)*log(N)] rows. So, for large values of N, yes, you can beat it.
The underlying question (challenge) is kind of silly. If the binary search answer is acceptable (where it sums sub arrays and sends them to IsEven) then I can think of a way to do it with E or less calls to IsEven (assuming the numbers are integers of course).
JavaScript to demonstrate
// sort the array by only the first bit of the number
A.sort(function(x,y) { return (x & 1) - (y & 1); });
// all of the evens will be at the beginning
for(var i=0; i < E && i < A.length; i++) {
if(IsEven(A[i]))
Print(A[i]);
else
break;
}
Not exactly a solution, but just few thoughts.
It is easy to see that if a solution exists for array length n that takes less than n tests, then for any array length m > n it is easy to see that there is always a solution with less than m tests. So, if you have a solution for n = 2 or 3 or 4, then the problem is solved.
You can split the array into pairs of numbers and for each pair: if the sum is odd, then exactly one of them is even, otherwise if one of the numbers is even, then both of them are even. This way for each pair it takes either one or two tests. Best case:n/2 tests, worse case:n tests, if even and odd numbers are chosen with equal probability, then: 3n/4 tests.
My hunch is there is no solution with less than n tests. Not sure how to prove it.
UPDATE: The second solution can be extended in the following way.
Check if the sum of two numbers is even. If odd, then exactly one of them is even. Otherwise label the set as "homogeneous set of size 2". Take two "homogenous set"s of same size n. Pick one number from each set and check if their sum is even. If it is even, combine these two sets to a "homogeneous set of size 2n". Otherwise, it implies that one of those sets purely consists of even numbers and the other one purely odd numbers.
Best case:n/2 tests. Average case: 3*n/2. Worst case is still n. Worst case exists only when all the numbers are even or all the numbers are odd.
If we can add and multiply array elements, then we can compute every Boolean function (up to complementation) on the low-order bits. Simulate a circuit that encodes the positions of the even numbers as a number from 0 to nC0 + nC1 + ... + nCe - 1 represented in binary and use calls to isEven to read off the bits.
Number of calls used: within 1 of the information-theoretic optimum.
See also fully homomorphic encryption.
I'm looking for an algorithm (or better yet, code!) for a the generation of powers, specifically numbers with an odd exponent greater than 1: third powers, fifth powers, seventh powers, and so forth. My desired output is then
8, 27, 32, 125, 128, 216, 243, 343, 512, 1000
and so forth up to a specified limit.
I don't want to store the powers in a list and sort them, because I'm making too many to fit in memory -- hopefully the limit be 1030 or so, corresponding to a memory requirement of ≈ 1 TB.
My basic idea is to have an array holding the current number (starting at 2) for each exponent, starting with 3 and going up to the binary log of the limit. At each step I loop through the exponent array, finding the one which yields the smallest power (finding either pow(base, exponent) or more likely exponent * log(base), probably memoizing these values). At that point call the 'output' function, which will actually do calculations with the number but of course you don't need to worry about that.
Of course because of the range of the numbers involved, bignums must be used -- built into the language, in a library, or self-rolled. Relevant code or code snippets would be appreciated: I feel that this task is similar to some classic problems (e.g., Hamming's problem of generating numbers that are of the form 2x3y5z) and can be solved efficiently. I'm fairly language-agnostic here: all I'll need for my 'output' function are arrays, subtraction, bignum-word comparison, and a bignum integer square root function.
Your example is missing 64=4^3, and 729=9^3.
You want the set of all { n^m } traversed in numerical order, m odd, n integral and n > 1. We know that (for n > 1) that increasing either n or m will increase this value, but short of calculation we can't compare much else.
There are two obvious "dual" ways to do this: keep track of the highest base n you consider, and for all bases less than that, the next exponent m to consider. Then pick the smallest one, and compare it to n^3. Or, the other way around -- keep track of the highest exponent m, and for each exponent smaller than that, keep track of the highest base used, and find the smallest one, and compare it to adding 2^m.
To make keeping track of these numbers efficiently, you'll want to keep them in a priority queue. Now, you still want to minimize the number of entries in the priority queue at a time, so we'll want to figure out which of these two methods does better job of this. It turns out that much higher n values are required to make it to a given point. At number k, the largest value of m seen will be log_2 of k, whereas the largest value of n seen will be k^(1/3).
So, we have a priority queue with elements (v, n, m), where the value v=n^m.
add_priority_queue(2^3, 2, 3)
for m in 5, 7, ....
v = 2^m
while value(peek(queue)) <= v:
(v1, n1, m1) = pop(queue)
if v1 != v print v1
add_priority_queue((n1+1)^m1, n1+1, m1)
add_priority_queue(2^m, 2, m)
Note that we need to check for v1 = v: we can have 2^9 = 512 = 8^3, and only one should be printed out, right?
A Haskell implementation, with a random priority queue grabbed off of hackage.
import Data.MeldableHeap
dropMin q = maybe empty snd (extractMin q)
numbers = generate_values (insert (2^3, 2, 3) empty) 5
generate_values q m = case findMin q of
Nothing -> []
Just (v1, n1, m1) -> case compare v1 (2^m) of
EQ -> generate_values (insert ((n1+1)^m1, n1+1, m1) (dropMin q)) m
LT -> v1 : generate_values (insert ((n1+1)^m1, n1+1, m1) (dropMin q)) m
GT -> 2^m : generate_values (insert (3^m, 3, m) q) (m + 2)
main = sequence_ (map print numbers)
I have a run currently at 177403008736354688547625 (that's 23 digits) and 1.3 GB plaintext output, after 8 minutes
deque numbers // stores a list of tuples - base number, and current odd power value - sorted by the current odd power value
for i = 2 .. infinity
numbers.push_back (i,i^3) // has to be the highest possible number so far
while numbers.peek_front[1] == i // front always has the lowest next value
print i
node = numbers.pop_front
node[1]=node[1]*(node[0]^2)
// put the node back into the numbers deque sorted by the second value in it - will end up being somewhere in the middle
at 2, numbers will be [2,8]
at 3, numbers will be [2,9], [3, 27]
...
at 8, numbers will be [2,8], [3,27].....[8,8^3]
You'll take off the first node, print it out, then put it back in the middle of numbers with the values [2,32]
I think this will work and has a reasonable memory usage.
There's a special case for 1, since 1^N never changes. This will also print out duplicate values for numbers - 256 for instance - and there are fairly simple ways to slightly alter the algorithm to remove those.
This solution is constant time for checking each number, but requires quite a bit of ram.
Consider k lists for numbers 2 .. k+1 numbers. Each list i represents the powers of number i+1. Since each list is a sorted use k-way merging with min heap to achieve what you need.
Min-heap is constructed with first indices of lists as key and after minimum is extracted we remove first element making second element as key and rearrange the heap to get next minimum.
This procedure is repeated till we get all numbers.
My question is: given a list L of length n, and an integer i such that 0 <= i < n!, how can you write a function perm(L, n) to produce the ith permutation of L in O(n) time? What I mean by ith permutation is just the ith permutation in some implementation defined ordering that must have the properties:
For any i and any 2 lists A and B, perm(A, i) and perm(B, i) must both map the jth element of A and B to an element in the same position for both A and B.
For any inputs (A, i), (A, j) perm(A, i)==perm(A, j) if and only if i==j.
NOTE: this is not homework. In fact, I solved this 2 years ago, but I've completely forgotten how, and it's killing me. Also, here is a broken attempt I made at a solution:
def perm(s, i):
n = len(s)
perm = [0]*n
itCount = 0
for elem in s:
perm[i%n + itCount] = elem
i = i / n
n -= 1
itCount+=1
return perm
ALSO NOTE: the O(n) requirement is very important. Otherwise you could just generate the n! sized list of all permutations and just return its ith element.
def perm(sequence, index):
sequence = list(sequence)
result = []
for x in xrange(len(sequence)):
idx = index % len(sequence)
index /= len(sequence)
result.append( sequence[idx] )
# constant time non-order preserving removal
sequence[idx] = sequence[-1]
del sequence[-1]
return result
Based on the algorithm for shuffling, but we take the least significant part of the number each time to decide which element to take instead of a random number. Alternatively consider it like the problem of converting to some arbitrary base except that the base name shrinks for each additional digit.
Could you use factoradics? You can find an illustration via this MSDN article.
Update: I wrote an extension of the MSDN algorithm that finds i'th permutation of n things taken r at a time, even if n != r.
A computational minimalistic approach (written in C-style pseudocode):
function perm(list,i){
for(a=list.length;a;a--){
list.switch(a-1,i mod a);
i=i/a;
}
return list;
}
Note that implementations relying on removing elements from the original list tend to run in O(n^2) time, at best O(n*log(n)) given a special tree style list implementation designed for quickly inserting and removing list elements.
The above code rather than shrinking the original list and keeping it in order just moves an element from the end to the vacant location, still makes a perfect 1:1 mapping between index and permutation, just a slightly more scrambled one, but in pure O(n) time.
So, I think I finally solved it. Before I read any answers, I'll post my own here.
def perm(L, i):
n = len(L)
if (n == 1):
return L
else:
split = i%n
return [L[split]] + perm(L[:split] + L[split+1:], i/n)
There are n! permutations. The first character can be chosen from L in n ways. Each of those choices leave (n-1)! permutations among them. So this idea is enough for establishing an order. In general, you will figure out what part you are in, pick the appropriate element and then recurse / loop on the smaller L.
The argument that this works correctly is by induction on the length of the sequence. (sketch) For a length of 1, it is trivial. For a length of n, you use the above observation to split the problem into n parts, each with a question on an L' with length (n-1). By induction, all the L's are constructed correctly (and in linear time). Then it is clear we can use the IH to construct a solution for length n.