Path of Length N in graph with constraints - algorithm

Question

I want to find number of path of length N in a graph where the vertex can be any natural number. However two vertex are connected only if the product of the two vertices is less than some natural number P. If the product of two vertexes are greater than P than those are not connected and can't be reached from one other.
I can obviously run two nested loops (<= P) and create an adjacency matrix, but P can be extremely large and this approach would be extremely slow. Can anyone think of some optimal approach to solve the problem? Can we solve it using Dynamic Programming?

Answer 1

I agree with Ante's recurrence, although I used a slightly simplified version. Note that I'm using the letter P to name the maximum product, as it is used in the original problem statement:
f(1,x) = 1
f(i,x) = sum(f(i-1, y) for y in {1, ..., floor(P/x)})
f(i,x) is the number of sequences of length i that end with x. The answer to the question is then f(n+1, 1).
Of course since P can be up to 10^9 in this task, a straightforward implementation with a DP table is out of the question. However, there are only up to m < 70000 possible different values of floor(P/i). So let's find the maximal segments aj ... bj, where floor(P/aj) = floor(P/bj). We can find those segments in O(number of segments * log P) using binary search.
Imagine the full DP table for f. Since there are only m different values for floor(P/x), every row of f consists of m contiguous ranges that have the same value.
So let's compute the compressed DP table, where we represent the rows as list of (length, value) pairs. We start with f(1) = [(P, 1)] and we can compute f(i+1) from f(i) by processing the segments in increasing order and computing prefix sums of the lengths stored in f(i).
The total runtime of my implementation of this approach is O(m (log P + n)). This is the code I used:
using ll=long long;
const int mod = 1000000007;
void add(int& x, ll y) { x = (x+y)%mod; }
int main() {
int n, P;
cin >> n >> P;
int x = 1;
vector<pair<int,int>> segments;
while(x <= P) {
int y = x+1, hi = P+1;
while(y<hi) {
int mid = (y+hi)/2;
if (P/mid < P/x) hi=mid;
else y=mid+1;
}
segments.push_back(make_pair(P/x, y-x));
x = y;
}
reverse(begin(segments), end(segments));
vector<pair<int,int>> dp;
dp.push_back(make_pair(P,1));
for (int i = 1; i <= n; ++i) {
int j = 0;
int sum_smaller = 0, cnt_smaller = 0;
vector<pair<int,int>> dp2;
for (auto it : segments) {
int value = it.first, cnt = it.second;
while (cnt_smaller + dp[j].first <= value) {
cnt_smaller += dp[j].first;
add(sum_smaller,(ll)dp[j].first*dp[j].second);
j++;
}
int pref_sum = sum_smaller;
if (value > cnt_smaller)
add(pref_sum, (ll)(value - cnt_smaller)*dp[j].second);
dp2.push_back(make_pair(cnt, pref_sum));
}
dp = dp2;
reverse(begin(dp),end(dp));
}
cout << dp[0].second << endl;
}
I needed to do some micro-optimizations with the handling of the arrays to get AC, but those aren't really relevant, so I left them away.

Answer 2

If number of vertices is small than adjacency matrix (A) can help. Since sum of elements in A^N is number of distinct paths, if paths are oriented. If not than number of paths i sum of elements / 2. That is due an element (i,j) represents number of paths from vertex i to vertex j.
In this case, same approach can be done by DP, using reasoning that number of paths of length n from vertex v is sum of numbers of paths of length n-1 of all it's neighbours. Neigbours of vertex i are vertices from 1 to floor(Q/i). With that we can construct function N(vertex, length) which represent number of paths from given vertex with given length:
N(i, 1) = floor(Q/i),
N(i, n) = sum( N(j, n-1) for j in {1, ..., floor(Q/i)}.
Number of all oriented paths of length is sum( N(i,N) ).