So I was looking at the various algorithms of solving Palindrome partitioning problem.
Like for a string "banana" minimum no of cuts so that each sub-string is a palindrome is 1 i.e. "b|anana"
Now I tried solving this problem using interval scheduling like:
Input: banana
Transformed string: # b # a # n # a # n # a #
P[] = lengths of palindromes considering each character as center of palindrome.
I[] = intervals
String: # b # a # n # a # n # a #
P[i]: 0 1 0 1 0 3 0 5 0 3 0 1 0
I[i]: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Example: Palindrome considering 'a' (index 7) as center is 5 "anana"
Now constructing intervals for each character based on P[i]:
b = (0,2)
a = (2,4)
n = (2,8)
a = (2,12)
n = (6,12)
a = (10,12)
So, now if I have to schedule these many intervals on time 0 to 12 such that minimum no of intervals should be scheduled and no time slot remain empty, I would choose (0,2) and (2,12) intervals and hence the answer for the solution would be 1 as I have broken down the given string in two palindromes.
Another test case:
String: # E # A # B # A # E # A # B #
P[i]: 0 1 0 1 0 5 0 1 0 5 0 1 0 1 0
I[i]: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Plotting on graph:
Now, the minimum no of intervals that can be scheduled are either:
1(0,2), 2(2,4), 5(4,14) OR
3(0,10), 6(10,12), 7(12,14)
Hence, we have 3 partitions so the no of cuts would be 2 either
E|A|BAEAB
EABAE|A|B
These are just examples. I would like to know if this algorithm will work for all cases or there are some cases where it would definitely fail.
Please help me achieve a proof that it will work in every scenario.
Note: Please don't discourage me if this post makes no sense as i have put enough time and effort on this problem, just state a reason or provide some link from where I can move forward with this solution. Thank you.
As long as you can get a partition of the string, your algorith will work.
Recall to mind that a partion P of a set S is a set of non empty subset A1, ..., An:
The union of every set A1, ... An gives the set S
The intersection between any Ai, Aj (with i != j) is empty
Even if the palindrome partitioning deals with strings (which are a bit different from sets), the properties of a partition are still true.
Hence, if you have a partition, you consequently have a set of time intervals without "holes" to schedule.
Choosing the partition with the minimum number of subsets, makes you have the minimum number of time intervals and therefore the minimum number of cuts.
Furthermore, you always have at least one palindrome partition of a string: in the worst case, you get a palindrome partition made of single characters.
Related
I want to convert a number in base 10 into a special base form like this:
A*2^2 + B*3^1 + C*2^0
A can take on values of [0,1]
B can take on values of [0,1,2]
C can take on values of [0,1]
For example, the number 8 would be
1*2^2 + 1*3 + 1.
It is guaranteed that the given number can be converted to this specialized base system.
I know how to convert from this base system back to base-10, but I do not know how to convert from base-10 to this specialized base system.
In short words, treat every base number (2^2, 3^1, 2^0 in your example) as weight of an item, and the whole number as the capacity of a bag. This problem wants us to find a combination of these items which they fill the bag exactly.
In the first place this problem is NP-complete. It is identical to the subset sum problem, which can also be seen as a derivative problem of the knapsack problem.
Despite this fact, this problem can however be solved by a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm using dynamic programming in O(nW) time, which n is the number of bases, and W is the number to decompose. The details can be find in this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem#Dynamic_programming and this SO page: What's it called when I want to choose items to fill container as full as possible - and what algorithm should I use?.
Simplifying your "special base":
X = A * 4 + B * 3 + C
A E {0,1}
B E {0,1,2}
C E {0,1}
Obviously the largest number that can be represented is 4 + 2 * 3 + 1 = 11
To figure out how to get the values of A, B, C you can do one of two things:
There are only 12 possible inputs: create a lookup table. Ugly, but quick.
Use some algorithm. A bit trickier.
Let's look at (1) first:
A B C X
0 0 0 0
0 0 1 1
0 1 0 3
0 1 1 4
0 2 0 6
0 2 1 7
1 0 0 4
1 0 1 5
1 1 0 7
1 1 1 8
1 2 0 10
1 2 1 11
Notice that 2 and 9 cannot be expressed in this system, while 4 and 7 occur twice. The fact that you have multiple possible solutions for a given input is a hint that there isn't a really robust algorithm (other than a look up table) to achieve what you want. So your table might look like this:
int A[] = {0,0,-1,0,0,1,0,1,1,-1,1,1};
int B[] = {0,0,-1,1,1,0,2,1,1,-1,2,2};
int C[] = {0,1,-1,0,2,1,0,1,1,-1,0,1};
Then look up A, B, C. If A < 0, there is no solution.
I've read every answer here, Wikipedia and WikiHow, the indian guy's lecture, and other sources, and I'm pretty sure I understand what they're saying and have implemented it that way. But I'm confused about a statement that all of these explanations make that is clearly false.
They all say to cover the zeros in the matrix with a minimum number of lines, and if that is equal to N (that is, there's a zero in every row and every column), then there's a zero solution and we're done. But then I found this:
a b c d e
A 0 7 0 0 0
B 0 8 0 0 6
C 5 0 7 3 4
D 5 0 5 9 3
E 0 4 0 0 9
There's a zero in every row and column, and no way to cover the zeros with fewer than five lines, but there's clearly no zero solution. Row C has only the zero in column b, but that leaves no zero for row D.
Do I misunderstand something here? Do I need a better test for whether or not there's a zero assignment possible? Are all these sources leaving out something essential?
You can cover the zeros in the matrix in your example with only four lines: column b, row A, row B, row E.
Here is a step-by-step walkthrough of the algorithm as it is presented in the Wikipedia article as of June 25 applied to your example:
a b c d e
A 0 7 0 0 0
B 0 8 0 0 6
C 5 0 7 3 4
D 5 0 5 9 3
E 0 4 0 0 9
Step 1: The minimum in each row is zero, so the subtraction has no effect. We try to assign tasks such that every task is performed at zero cost, but this turns out to be impossible. Proceed to next step.
Step 2: The minimum in each column is also zero, so this step also has no effect. Proceed to next step.
Step 3: We locate a minimal number of lines to cover up all the zeros. We find [b,A,B,E].
a b c d e
A ---|---------
B ---|---------
C 5 | 7 3 4
D 5 | 5 9 3
E ---|---------
Step 4: We locate the minimal uncovered element. This is 3, at (C,d) and (D,e). We subtract 3 from every unmarked element and add 3 to every element covered by two lines:
a b c d e
A 0 10 0 0 0
B 0 11 0 0 6
C 2 0 4 0 1
D 2 0 2 6 0
E 0 7 0 0 9
Immediately the minimum number of lines to cover up all the zeros becomes 5. This is easy to verify as there is a zero in every row and a zero in every column. The algorithm asserts that an assignment like the one we were looking for in step 1 should now be possible on the new matrix.
We try to assign tasks such that every task is performed at zero cost (according to the new matrix). This is now possible. We find the solution [(A,e),(B,c),(C,d),(D,b),(E,a)].
We can now go back and verify that the solution that we found actually is optimal. We see that every assigned job has zero cost, except (C,d), which has cost 3. Since 3 is actually the lowest nonzero element in the matrix, and we have seen that there is no zero-cost solution, it is clear that this is an optimal solution.
The problem statement:
Give n variables and k pairs. The variables can be distinct by assigning a value from 1 to n to each variable. Each pair p contain 2 variables and let the absolute difference between 2 variables in p is abs(p). Define the upper bound of difference is U=max(Abs(p)|every p).
Find an assignment that minimize U.
Limit:
n<=100
k<=1000
Each variable appear at least 2 times in list of pairs.
A problem instance:
Input
n=9, k=12
1 2 (meaning pair x1 x2)
1 3
1 4
1 5
2 3
2 6
3 5
3 7
3 8
3 9
6 9
8 9
Output:
1 2 5 4 3 6 7 8 9
(meaning x1=1,x2=2,x3=5,...)
Explaination: An assignment of x1=1,x2=2,x3=3,... will result in U=6 (3 9 has greastest abs value). The output assignment will get U=4, the minimum value (changed pair: 3 7 => 5 7, 3 8 => 5 8, etc. and 3 5 isn't changed. In this case, abs(p)<=4 for every pair).
There is an important point: To achieve the best assignments, the variables in the pairs that have greatest abs must be change.
Base on this, I have thought of a greedy algorithm:
1)Assign every x to default assignment (x(i)=i)
2)Locate pairs that have largest abs and x(i)'s contained in them.
3)For every i,j: Calculate U. Swap value of x(i),x(j). Calculate U'. If U'<U, stop and repeat step 3. If U'>=U for every i,j, end and output the assignment.
However, this method has a major pitfall, if we need an assignment like this:
x(a)<<x(b), x(b)<<x(c), x(c)<<x(a)
, we have to swap in 2 steps, like: x(a)<=>x(b), then x(b)<=>x(c), then there is a possibility that x(b)<<x(a) in first step has its abs become larger than U and the swap failed.
Is there any efficient algorithm to solve this problem?
This looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_bandwidth (NP complete, even for special cases). It looks like people run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthill-McKee_algorithm when they need to do this to try and turn a sparse matrix into a banded diagonal matrix.
Can we use a factor-oracle with suffix link (paper here) to compute the longest common substring of multiple strings? Here, substring means any part of the original string. For example "abc" is the substring of "ffabcgg", while "abg" is not.
I've found a way to compute the maximum length common substring of two strings s1 and s2. It works by concatenating the two strings using a character not in them, '$' for example. Then for each prefix of the concatenated string s with length i >= |s1| + 2, we calculate its LRS (longest repeated suffix) length lrs[i] and sp[i] (the end position of the first occurence of its LRS). Finally, the answer is
max{lrs[i]| i >= |s1| + 2 and sp[i] <= |s1|}
I've written a C++ program that uses this method, which can solve the problem within 200ms on my laptop when |s1|+|s2| <= 200000, using the factor oracle.
s1 = 'ffabcgg'
s2 = 'gfbcge'
s = s1+'$'+s2
= 'ffabcgg$gfbcge'
p: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
s: f f a b c g g $ g f b c g e
sp: 0 1 0 0 0 0 6 0 6 1 4 5 6 0
lrs:0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 2 3 0
ans = lrs[13] = 3
I know the both problems can be solved using suffix-array and suffix-tree with high efficiency, but I wonder if there is a method using factor oracle to solve it. I am interested in this because the factor oracle is easy to construct (with 30 lines of C++, suffix-array needs about 60, and suffix-tree needs 150), and it runs faster than suffix-array and suffix-tree.
You can test your method of the first problem in this OnlineJudge, and the second problem in here.
Can we use a factor-oracle with suffix link (paper here) to compute
the longest common substring of multiple strings?
I don't think the algorithm is a very good fit (it is designed to factor a single string) but you can use it by concatenating the original strings with a unique separator.
Given abcdefg and hijcdekl and mncdop, find the longest common substring cd:
# combine with unique joiners
>>> s = "abcdefg" + "1" + "hijcdekl" + "2" + "mncdop"
>>> factor_oracle(s)
"cd"
As part of its linear-time and space algorithm, the factor-oracle quickly rediscover the break points between the input strings as part of its search for common factors (the unique joiners provide and immediate cue to stop extending the best factor found so far).
given a sorted array of distinct integers, what is the minimum number of steps required to make the integers contiguous? Here the condition is that: in a step , only one element can be changed and can be either increased or decreased by 1 . For example, if we have 2,4,5,6 then '2' can be made '3' thus making the elements contiguous(3,4,5,6) .Hence the minimum steps here is 1 . Similarly for the array: 2,4,5,8:
Step 1: '2' can be made '3'
Step 2: '8' can be made '7'
Step 3: '7' can be made '6'
Thus the sequence now is 3,4,5,6 and the number of steps is 3.
I tried as follows but am not sure if its correct?
//n is the number of elements in array a
int count=a[n-1]-a[0]-1;
for(i=1;i<=n-2;i++)
{
count--;
}
printf("%d\n",count);
Thanks.
The intuitive guess is that the "center" of the optimal sequence will be the arithmetic average, but this is not the case. Let's find the correct solution with some vector math:
Part 1: Assuming the first number is to be left alone (we'll deal with this assumption later), calculate the differences, so 1 12 3 14 5 16-1 2 3 4 5 6 would yield 0 -10 0 -10 0 -10.
sidenote: Notice that a "contiguous" array by your implied definition would be an increasing arithmetic sequence with difference 1. (Note that there are other reasonable interpretations of your question: some people may consider 5 4 3 2 1 to be contiguous, or 5 3 1 to be contiguous, or 1 2 3 2 3 to be contiguous. You also did not specify if negative numbers should be treated any differently.)
theorem: The contiguous numbers must lie between the minimum and maximum number. [proof left to reader]
Part 2: Now returning to our example, assuming we took the 30 steps (sum(abs(0 -10 0 -10 0 -10))=30) required to turn 1 12 3 14 5 16 into 1 2 3 4 5 6. This is one correct answer. But 0 -10 0 -10 0 -10+c is also an answer which yields an arithmetic sequence of difference 1, for any constant c. In order to minimize the number of "steps", we must pick an appropriate c. In this case, each time we increase or decrease c, we increase the number of steps by N=6 (the length of the vector). So for example if we wanted to turn our original sequence 1 12 3 14 5 16 into 3 4 5 6 7 8 (c=2), then the differences would have been 2 -8 2 -8 2 -8, and sum(abs(2 -8 2 -8 2 -8))=30.
Now this is very clear if you could picture it visually, but it's sort of hard to type out in text. First we took our difference vector. Imagine you drew it like so:
4|
3| *
2| * |
1| | | *
0+--+--+--+--+--*
-1| |
-2| *
We are free to "shift" this vector up and down by adding or subtracting 1 from everything. (This is equivalent to finding c.) We wish to find the shift which minimizes the number of | you see (the area between the curve and the x-axis). This is NOT the average (that would be minimizing the standard deviation or RMS error, not the absolute error). To find the minimizing c, let's think of this as a function and consider its derivative. If the differences are all far away from the x-axis (we're trying to make 101 112 103 114 105 116), it makes sense to just not add this extra stuff, so we shift the function down towards the x-axis. Each time we decrease c, we improve the solution by 6. Now suppose that one of the *s passes the x axis. Each time we decrease c, we improve the solution by 5-1=4 (we save 5 steps of work, but have to do 1 extra step of work for the * below the x-axis). Eventually when HALF the *s are past the x-axis, we can NO LONGER IMPROVE THE SOLUTION (derivative: 3-3=0). (In fact soon we begin to make the solution worse, and can never make it better again. Not only have we found the minimum of this function, but we can see it is a global minimum.)
Thus the solution is as follows: Pretend the first number is in place. Calculate the vector of differences. Minimize the sum of the absolute value of this vector; do this by finding the median OF THE DIFFERENCES and subtracting that off from the differences to obtain an improved differences-vector. The sum of the absolute value of the "improved" vector is your answer. This is O(N) The solutions of equal optimality will (as per the above) always be "adjacent". A unique solution exists only if there are an odd number of numbers; otherwise if there are an even number of numbers, AND the median-of-differences is not an integer, the equally-optimal solutions will have difference-vectors with corrective factors of any number between the two medians.
So I guess this wouldn't be complete without a final example.
input: 2 3 4 10 14 14 15 100
difference vector: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9-2 3 4 10 14 14 15 100 = 0 0 0 -5 -8 -7 -7 -91
note that the medians of the difference-vector are not in the middle anymore, we need to perform an O(N) median-finding algorithm to extract them...
medians of difference-vector are -5 and -7
let us take -5 to be our correction factor (any number between the medians, such as -6 or -7, would also be a valid choice)
thus our new goal is 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9+5=7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14, and the new differences are 5 5 5 0 -3 -2 -2 -86*
this means we will need to do 5+5+5+0+3+2+2+86=108 steps
*(we obtain this by repeating step 2 with our new target, or by adding 5 to each number of the previous difference... but since you only care about the sum, we'd just add 8*5 (vector length times correct factor) to the previously calculated sum)
Alternatively, we could have also taken -6 or -7 to be our correction factor. Let's say we took -7...
then the new goal would have been 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9+7=9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16, and the new differences would have been 7 7 7 2 1 0 0 -84
this would have meant we'd need to do 7+7+7+2+1+0+0+84=108 steps, the same as above
If you simulate this yourself, can see the number of steps becomes >108 as we take offsets further away from the range [-5,-7].
Pseudocode:
def minSteps(array A of size N):
A' = [0,1,...,N-1]
diffs = A'-A
medianOfDiffs = leftMedian(diffs)
return sum(abs(diffs-medianOfDiffs))
Python:
leftMedian = lambda x:sorted(x)[len(x)//2]
def minSteps(array):
target = range(len(array))
diffs = [t-a for t,a in zip(target,array)]
medianOfDiffs = leftMedian(diffs)
return sum(abs(d-medianOfDiffs) for d in diffs)
edit:
It turns out that for arrays of distinct integers, this is equivalent to a simpler solution: picking one of the (up to 2) medians, assuming it doesn't move, and moving other numbers accordingly. This simpler method often gives incorrect answers if you have any duplicates, but the OP didn't ask that, so that would be a simpler and more elegant solution. Additionally we can use the proof I've given in this solution to justify the "assume the median doesn't move" solution as follows: the corrective factor will always be in the center of the array (i.e. the median of the differences will be from the median of the numbers). Thus any restriction which also guarantees this can be used to create variations of this brainteaser.
Get one of the medians of all the numbers. As the numbers are already sorted, this shouldn't be a big deal. Assume that median does not move. Then compute the total cost of moving all the numbers accordingly. This should give the answer.
community edit:
def minSteps(a):
"""INPUT: list of sorted unique integers"""
oneMedian = a[floor(n/2)]
aTarget = [oneMedian + (i-floor(n/2)) for i in range(len(a))]
# aTargets looks roughly like [m-n/2?, ..., m-1, m, m+1, ..., m+n/2]
return sum(abs(aTarget[i]-a[i]) for i in range(len(a)))
This is probably not an ideal solution, but a first idea.
Given a sorted sequence [x1, x2, …, xn]:
Write a function that returns the differences of an element to the previous and to the next element, i.e. (xn – xn–1, xn+1 – xn).
If the difference to the previous element is > 1, you would have to increase all previous elements by xn – xn–1 – 1. That is, the number of necessary steps would increase by the number of previous elements × (xn – xn–1 – 1). Let's call this number a.
If the difference to the next element is >1, you would have to decrease all subsequent elements by xn+1 – xn – 1. That is, the number of necessary steps would increase by the number of subsequent elements × (xn+1 – xn – 1). Let's call this number b.
If a < b, then increase all previous elements until they are contiguous to the current element. If a > b, then decrease all subsequent elements until they are contiguous to the current element. If a = b, it doesn't matter which of these two actions is chosen.
Add up the number of steps taken in the previous step (by increasing the total number of necessary steps by either a or b), and repeat until all elements are contiguous.
First of all, imagine that we pick an arbitrary target of contiguous increasing values and then calculate the cost (number of steps required) for modifying the array the array to match.
Original: 3 5 7 8 10 16
Target: 4 5 6 7 8 9
Difference: +1 0 -1 -1 -2 -7 -> Cost = 12
Sign: + 0 - - - -
Because the input array is already ordered and distinct, it is strictly increasing. Because of this, it can be shown that the differences will always be non-increasing.
If we change the target by increasing it by 1, the cost will change. Each position in which the difference is currently positive or zero will incur an increase in cost by 1. Each position in which the difference is currently negative will yield a decrease in cost by 1:
Original: 3 5 7 8 10 16
New target: 5 6 7 8 9 10
New Difference: +2 +1 0 0 -1 -6 -> Cost = 10 (decrease by 2)
Conversely, if we decrease the target by 1, each position in which the difference is currently positive will yield a decrease in cost by 1, while each position in which the difference is zero or negative will incur an increase in cost by 1:
Original: 3 5 7 8 10 16
New target: 3 4 5 6 7 8
New Difference: 0 -1 -2 -2 -3 -8 -> Cost = 16 (increase by 4)
In order to find the optimal values for the target array, we must find a target such that any change (increment or decrement) will not decrease the cost. Note that an increment of the target can only decrease the cost when there are more positions with negative difference than there are with zero or positive difference. A decrement can only decrease the cost when there are more positions with a positive difference than with a zero or negative difference.
Here are some example distributions of difference signs. Remember that the differences array is non-increasing, so positives always have to be first and negatives last:
C C
+ + + - - - optimal
+ + 0 - - - optimal
0 0 0 - - - optimal
+ 0 - - - - can increment (negatives exceed positives & zeroes)
+ + + 0 0 0 optimal
+ + + + - - can decrement (positives exceed negatives & zeroes)
+ + 0 0 - - optimal
+ 0 0 0 0 0 optimal
C C
Observe that if one of the central elements (marked C) is zero, the target must be optimal. In such a circumstance, at best any increment or decrement will not change the cost, but it may increase it. This result is important, because it gives us a trivial solution. We pick a target such that a[n/2] remains unchanged. There may be other possible targets that yield the same cost, but there are definitely none that are better. Here's the original code modified to calculate this cost:
//n is the number of elements in array a
int targetValue;
int cost = 0;
int middle = n / 2;
int startValue = a[middle] - middle;
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
targetValue = startValue + i;
cost += abs(targetValue - a[i]);
}
printf("%d\n",cost);
You can not do it by iterating once on the array, that's for sure.
You need first to check the difference between each two numbers, for example:
2,7,8,9 can be 2,3,4,5 with 18 steps or 6,7,8,9 with 4 steps.
Create a new array with the difference like so: for 2,7,8,9 it wiil be 4,1,1. Now you can decide whether to increase or decrease the first number.
Lets assume that the contiguous array looks something like this -
c c+1 c+2 c+3 .. and so on
Now lets take an example -
5 7 8 10
The contiguous array in this case will be -
c c+1 c+2 c+3
In order to get the minimum steps, the sum of the modulus of the difference of the integers(before and after) w.r.t the ith index should be the minimum. In which case,
(c-5)^2 + (c-6)^2 + (c-6)^2 + (c-7)^2 should be minimum
Let f(c) = (c-5)^2 + (c-6)^2 + (c-6)^2 + (c-7)^2
= 4c^2 - 48c + 146
Applying differential calculus to get the minima,
f'(c) = 8c - 48 = 0
=> c = 6
So our contiguous array is 6 7 8 9 and the minimum cost here is 2.
To sum it up, just generate f(c), get the first differential and find out c.
This should take O(n).
Brute force approach O(N*M)
If one draws a line through each point in the array a then y0 is a value where each line starts at index 0. Then the answer is the minimum among number of steps reqired to get from a to every line that starts at y0, in Python:
y0s = set((y - i) for i, y in enumerate(a))
nsteps = min(sum(abs(y-(y0+i)) for i, y in enumerate(a))
for y0 in xrange(min(y0s), max(y0s)+1)))
Input
2,4,5,6
2,4,5,8
Output
1
3