Lets say we have 3 people, Alice, Bob, and Charlie.
Lets say each of them have a resource, Aplles, Bannanas, and Coconuts.
Each of them have 3 of this resource.
The goal of the algorithm is to make 1-1 trades such that each of them end up with 1 of each of our 3 resources. A list of those trades is what I want to obtain.
Ideally I would like to know how to solve this. But I'm willing to settle for the name of this kind of problem, or a problem similar to it that I can research and get ideas from.
The problem I'm working on will have around 600 objects, with ~1000 people each with a random amount/type of starting resources, (with the assumption that there are enough resources to satisfy our end result) so Ideally any solution provided would be feasible for such a scale. But I'll take whatever I can get, I just need some kind of starting point.
The answers of ElKamina and Tyler Durden are decent, but they don't seem to take into account that Kuriso would like to perform 1-1 trades, that people may have multiple commodities, and multiple units of commodities. I have a naive solution that does.
I think the original example was a bit oversimplified, so let's take another one:
c1 c2 c3 c4
A 5 0 1 0
B 0 1 0 1
C 0 6 2 0
Where A,B,C are people and c1,c2,c3,c4 are the commodities.
First, let's calculate the ideal distribution, which is easily done: for each commodity, divide the sum of stuff by the number of people, rounded down, and everybody gets that:
c1 c2 c3 c4
A 1 2 1 0
B 1 2 1 0
C 1 2 1 0
Now let's define a WANT function denoting how much of a stuff c would person X need to get into the ideal position: WANT(X,c) = IDEAL(c) - Xc.
c1 c2 c3 c4 sum
A -4 2 0 0 -2
B 1 1 1 0 3
C 1 -4 -1 0 -4
Let's make a list of people ordered by the sum of their wants. Let's take the richest guy, the one with the lowest want, in this case C, and let's try to satisfy his wants by matching him up with people who has the most to offer of the commodity he wants most. If they can make a trade, great, if not, continue until we find a match (a match is guaranteed, eventually). In this example, C needs c1; the one offering the most c1 is A, iterating over the commodities, we find that A needs c2 and C does have surplus c2, so they exchange them. Update their position in the list, or remove them if they no longer have any needs. Iterate this until nobody has any wants. This won't produce properly equal distribution, but as equal as they can get to by 1 for 1 trading.
This is indeed a naive solution, with the heuristics that the richest guy has the most chance to offer stuff in return for the commodity he needs. The complexity is high, but with ordered lists it should be managable for the numbers you specified.
Assume you have a total number of x1 resources of kind 1,..., xn resources of kind n.
Assume you have k people and each of them have (or need to end up with y1, y2,..., yk resources respectively.
Now, pick a person i and assign him resources that are most prevalent. Once assignment is done, decrement the corresponding xj s (i.e. if resource j is assigned to i, decrement xj).
Keep repeating until all resources are assigned.
This is the way to assign stuff most evenly. It assumes that you dont care about sequences of trades, but the end result itself.
To restate this, let's say you have set of lists like this:
{ 1, 1, 1 }
{ 2, 2, 2 }
{ 3, 3, 3 }
and you want to swap elements from different sets until you have the sets like this:
{ 1, 2, 3 }
{ 1, 2, 3 }
{ 1, 2, 3 }
Now, you might notice that if we regard these lists as a single matrix then one matrix is the inverse of the other. You can perform this inversion by swapping across the 1-2-3 diagonal.
So item 2 in list 1 is swapped with item 2 in row 2, item 3 in list 1 is swapped with item 1 in list 3, and finally item 3 in list 2 is swapped with item 2 in list 3.
To sum up: do a matrix inversion by swapping across the diagonal.
Related
For a project I have to design an algorithm that will fit a group of people into hotel rooms given their preference. I have created a dictionary in Python that has a person as key, and as a value a list of all people they would like to be in a room with.
There are different types of rooms that can hold between 2-10 people. How many rooms of what type there are is specified by the user of the program.
I have tried to brute force this problem by trying all room combinations and then giving each room a score based on the preference of the residents and looking for the maximum score. This works fine for small group sizes but having a group of 200 will give 200! combinations which my poor computer will not be able to compute within my lifetime.
I was wondering if there is an algorithm that I have not been able to find with the solution to my problem.
Thanks in advance!
Thijs
What you can do is think of your dictionary as a graph. Then you can create an adjacency matrix.
For example let say you have a group of 4 people, A, B, C and D.
A: wants to be with B and C
B: wants to be with A
C: wants to be with D
D: want to be with A and C
Your matrix would look like this:
// A B C D
// A 0 1 1 0
// B 1 0 0 0
// C 0 0 0 1
// D 1 0 1 0
Let's call this matrix M. You can then calculate the transpose (let's call it MT) and add M to MT. You will get something like this.
// A B C D
// A 0 2 1 1
// B 2 0 0 0
// C 1 0 0 2
// D 1 0 2 0
Then order the lines (or the columns it doesn't matter because it is symmetric) based on the sum of its values.
// A B C D
// A 0 2 1 1
// C 1 0 0 2
// D 1 0 2 0
// B 2 0 0 0
Do the same with the columns
// A C D B
// A 0 1 1 2
// C 1 0 2 0
// D 1 2 0 0
// B 2 0 0 0
Start filling your rooms starting from the first line based on the greatest value in that line and reduce the matrix by removing people that were assigned a room. You should start by selecting the biggest room first.
For example if we have a room that can have 2 people you'd assign person B and A to it since the biggest value in the first line is 2 and it corresponds to person B.
The reduced matrix would then be:
// C D
// C 0 2
// D 2 0
And you loop till all is done.
You already had a greedy solution described. So instead I'll suggest a simulated annealing solution.
For this you first assign everyone to rooms randomly. And now you start considering swapping people at random. You always accept swaps that improve your score, but have a chance of accepting a bad swap. The chance of accepting a bad swap goes down if the swap is really bad, and also goes down with time. After you've experimented enough, whatever you have is probably pretty good.
It is called "simulated annealing" because it is a simulation of the process by which a slowly cooling substance forms a well-organized crystal structure. So the parameter that you usually use is called T for temperature. And a standard function is:
def maybe_swap(assignment, x, y, T):
score_now = score(assignment)
swapped = swap(assignment, x, y)
score_swapped = score(swapped)
if random.random() < math.exp( (score_swapped - score_now) / T ):
return swapped
else:
return assignment
And then you just have to play around with how much work to do. Something like this:
for count_down in range(400, -1, -1):
for i in range(n^2):
x = floor(random.random(n))
y = floor(random.random(n))
if x != y:
assignment = maybe_swap(assignment, x, y, count_down / 100.0)
(You should play around with the parameters.)
Alice invents a key (s1, s2, s3, ... , sk). Bob makes a guess (g1, g2, g3, ... , gk).He is awarded one point for each si = gi.
Each s1 is an integer with the range of 0<=si<=11.
Given a q guesses with their scores bi
(g1, g2, g3, ... , gk) b1
(g1, g2, g3, ... , gk) b2
.
.
.
(g1, g2, g3, ... , gk) bq
Can you state if there is a key possible. Given 0<=si<=11, 1<=k<=11, 1<=q<=8.
For Example
2 2 1 1 2
1 1 2 2 1
For the guess 2 2 1 1 the score is 2
For the guess 1 1 2 2 the score is 1
Because there is a key possible let's say 2 1 1 3 which gives the desired scores.Hence the answer is yes
Another Example
1 2 3 4 4
4 3 2 1 1
For the guess 1 2 3 4 the score is 4
For the guess 4 3 2 1 the score is 1
This has no key which gives the desired scores hence answer is NO
I tried the brute force approach generating n^k such keys where n is the range of si.But it gave Time Limit exceeding error.
Its an interview puzzle. I have seen variants of this question but was not able to solve them.Can you tell me what should I read for such type of questions.
I don't know the best solution to this problem, but if you did a recursive search of the possible solution space, pruning branches which could not possibly lead to a solution, it would be much faster than trying all (n^k) keys.
Take your example:
1 2 3 4 4 -> 4
4 3 2 1 1 -> 1
The 3 possible values for g1 which could be significant are: 1, 4, and "neither 1 nor 4". Choose one of them, and then recursively look at the possible values for g2. Choose one, and recursively look at the possible values for g3, etc.
As you search, keep track of a cumulative score for each of the guesses from b1 to bq. Whenever you choose a value for a digit, increment the cumulative scores for all the guesses which have the same number in that position. Keep these cumulative scores on a stack (so you can back up).
When you reach a point where no solution is possible, back up and continue searching a different path. If you back all the way up to g1 and no more paths are left to search, then the answer is NO. If you find a solution, then the answer is YES.
When to stop searching a path and back up:
If the cumulative score of one of the guesses exceeds the given score
If the cumulative score of one of the guesses is less than the given score minus the number of levels left in the search tree (before you hit the bottom)
This approach could still be very slow, especially if "k" was large. But again, it will be far faster than generating (n^k) keys.
I was browsing through the internet when i found out that there is an algorithm called cycle sort which makes the least number of memory writes.But i am not able to find the algorithm anywhere.How to detect whether a cycle is there or not in an array?
Can anybody give a complete explanation for this algorithm?
The cycle sort algorithm is motivated by something called a cycle decomposition. Cycle decompositions are best explained by example. Let's suppose that you have this array:
4 3 0 1 2
Let's imagine that we have this sequence in sorted order, as shown here:
0 1 2 3 4
How would we have to shuffle this sorted array to get to the shuffled version? Well, let's place them side-by-side:
0 1 2 3 4
4 3 0 1 2
Let's start from the beginning. Notice that the number 0 got swapped to the position initially held by 2. The number 2, in turn, got swapped to the position initially held by 4. Finally, 4 got swapped to the position initially held by 0. In other words, the elements 0, 2, and 4 all were cycled forward one position. That leaves behind the numbers 1 and 3. Notice that 1 swaps to where 3 is and 3 swaps to where 1 is. In other words, the elements 1 and 3 were cycled forward one position.
As a result of the above observations, we'd say that the sequence 4 3 0 1 2 has cycle decomposition (0 2 4)(1 3). Here, each group of terms in parentheses means "circularly cycle these elements forward." This means to cycle 0 to the spot where 2 is, 2 to the spot where 4 is, and 4 to the spot where 0 was, then to cycle 1 to the spot where 3 was and 3 to the spot where 1 is.
If you have the cycle decomposition for a particular array, you can get it back in sorted order making the fewest number of writes by just cycling everything backward one spot. The idea behind cycle sort is to try to determine what the cycle decomposition of the input array is, then to reverse it to put everything back in its place.
Part of the challenge of this is figuring out where everything initially belongs since a cycle decomposition assumes you know this. Typically, cycle sort works by going to each element and counting up how many elements are smaller than it. This is expensive - it contributes to the Θ(n2) runtime of the sorting algorithm - but doesn't require any writes.
here's a python implementation if anyone needs
def cycleSort(vector):
writes = 0
# Loop through the vector to find cycles to rotate.
for cycleStart, item in enumerate(vector):
# Find where to put the item.
pos = cycleStart
for item2 in vector[cycleStart + 1:]:
if item2 < item:
pos += 1
# If the item is already there, this is not a cycle.
if pos == cycleStart:
continue
# Otherwise, put the item there or right after any duplicates.
while item == vector[pos]:
pos += 1
vector[pos], item = item, vector[pos]
writes += 1
# Rotate the rest of the cycle.
while pos != cycleStart:
# Find where to put the item.
pos = cycleStart
for item2 in vector[cycleStart + 1:]:
if item2 < item:
pos += 1
# Put the item there or right after any duplicates.
while item == vector[pos]:
pos += 1
vector[pos], item = item, vector[pos]
writes += 1
return writes
x = [0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 9, 3.5, 5, 8, 4, 7, 0, 6]
w = cycleSort(x)
print w, x
I'm trying to solve one of the Project Euler problems. As a consequence, I need an algorithm that will help me find all possible partitions of a set, in any order.
For instance, given the set 2 3 3 5:
2 | 3 3 5
2 | 3 | 3 5
2 | 3 3 | 5
2 | 3 | 3 | 5
2 5 | 3 3
and so on. Pretty much every possible combination of the members of the set. I've searched the net of course, but haven't found much that's directly useful to me, since I speak programmer-ese not advanced-math-ese.
Can anyone help me out with this? I can read pretty much any programming language, from BASIC to Haskell, so post in whatever language you wish.
Have you considered a search tree? Each node would represent a choice of where to put an element and the leaf nodes are answers. I won't give you code because that's part of the fun of Project Euler ;)
Take a look at:
The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 3: Generating All Combinations and Partitions
7.2.1.5. Generating all set partitions
In general I would look at the structure of the recursion used to compute the number of configurations, and build a similar recursion for enumerating them. Best is to compute a one-to-one mapping between integers and configurations. This works well for permutations, combinations, etc. and ensures that each configuration is enumerated only once.
Now even the recursion for the number of partitions of some identical items is rather complicated.
For partitions of multisets the counting amounts to solving the generalization of Project Euler problem 181 to arbitrary multisets.
Well, the problem has two aspects.
Firsty, the items can be arranged in any order. So for N items, there are N! permutations (assuming the items are treated as unique).
Secondly, you can envision the grouping as a bit flag between each item indicating a divide. There would be N-1 of these flags, so for a given permutation there would be 2^(N-1) possible groupings.
This means that for N items, there would be a total of N!*(2^(N-1)) groupings/permutations, which gets big very very fast.
In your example, the top four items are groupings of one permutation. The last item is a grouping of another permutation. Your items can be viewed as :
2 on 3 off 3 off 5
2 on 3 on 3 off 5
2 on 3 off 3 on 5
2 on 3 on 3 on 5
2 off 5 on 3 off 3
The permutations (the order of display) can be derived by looking at them like a tree, as mentioned by the other two. This would almost certainly involve recursion, such as here.
The grouping is independent of them in many ways. Once you have all the permutations, you can link them with the groupings if needed.
Here is the code you need for this part of your problem:
def memoize(f):
memo={}
def helper(x):
if x not in memo:
memo[x]=f(x)
return memo[x]
return helper
#memoize
def A000041(n):
if n == 0: return 1
S = 0
J = n-1
k = 2
while 0 <= J:
T = A000041(J)
S = S+T if k//2%2!=0 else S-T
J -= k if k%2!=0 else k//2
k += 1
return S
print A000041(100) #the 100's number in this series, as an example
I quickly whipped up some code to do this. However, I left out separating every possible combination of the given list, because I wasn't sure it was actually needed, but it should be easy to add, if necessary.
Anyway, the code runs quite well for small amounts, but, as CodeByMoonlight already mentioned, the amount of possibilities gets really high really fast, so the runtime increases accordingly.
Anyway, here's the python code:
import time
def separate(toseparate):
"Find every possible way to separate a given list."
#The list of every possibility
possibilities = []
n = len(toseparate)
#We can distribute n-1 separations in the given list, so iterate from 0 to n
for i in xrange(n):
#Create a copy of the list to avoid modifying the already existing list
copy = list(toseparate)
#A boolean list indicating where a separator is put. 'True' indicates a separator
#and 'False', of course, no separator.
#The list will contain i separators, the rest is filled with 'False'
separators = [True]*i + [False]*(n-i-1)
for j in xrange(len(separators)):
#We insert the separators into our given list. The separators have to
#be between two elements. The index between two elements is always
#2*[index of the left element]+1.
copy.insert(2*j+1, separators[j])
#The first possibility is, of course, the one we just created
possibilities.append(list(copy))
#The following is a modification of the QuickPerm algorithm, which finds
#all possible permutations of a given list. It was modified to only permutate
#the spaces between two elements, so it finds every possibility to insert n
#separators in the given list.
m = len(separators)
hi, lo = 1, 0
p = [0]*m
while hi < m:
if p[hi] < hi:
lo = (hi%2)*p[hi]
copy[2*lo+1], copy[2*hi+1] = copy[2*hi+1], copy[2*lo+1]
#Since the items are non-unique, some possibilities will show up more than once, so we
#avoid this by checking first.
if not copy in possibilities:
possibilities.append(list(copy))
p[hi] += 1
hi = 1
else:
p[hi] = 0
hi += 1
return possibilities
t1 = time.time()
separations = separate([2, 3, 3, 5])
print time.time()-t1
sepmap = {True:"|", False:""}
for a in separations:
for b in a:
if sepmap.has_key(b):
print sepmap[b],
else:
print b,
print "\n",
It's based on the QuickPerm algorithm, which you can read more about here: QuickPerm
Basically, my code generates a list containing n separations, inserts them into the given list and then finds all possible permutations of the separations in the list.
So, if we use your example we would get:
2 3 3 5
2 | 3 3 5
2 3 | 3 5
2 3 3 | 5
2 | 3 | 3 5
2 3 | 3 | 5
2 | 3 3 | 5
2 | 3 | 3 | 5
In 0.000154972076416 seconds.
However, I read through the problem description of the problem you are doing and I see how you are trying to solve this, but seeing how quickly the runtime increases I don't think that it would work as fast you would expect. Remember that Project Euler's problems should solve in around a minute.
Question
Do you think genetic algorithms worth trying out for the problem below, or will I hit local-minima issues?
I think maybe aspects of the problem is great for a generator / fitness-function style setup. (If you've botched a similar project I would love hear from you, and not do something similar)
Thank you for any tips on how to structure things and nail this right.
The problem
I'm searching a good scheduling algorithm to use for the following real-world problem.
I have a sequence with 15 slots like this (The digits may vary from 0 to 20) :
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
(And there are in total 10 different sequences of this type)
Each sequence needs to expand into an array, where each slot can take 1 position.
1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1
The constraints on the matrix is that:
[row-wise, i.e. horizontally] The number of ones placed, must either be 11 or 111
[row-wise] The distance between two sequences of 1 needs to be a minimum of 00
The sum of each column should match the original array.
The number of rows in the matrix should be optimized.
The array then needs to allocate one of 4 different matrixes, which may have different number of rows:
A, B, C, D
A, B, C and D are real-world departments. The load needs to be placed reasonably fair during the course of a 10-day period, not to interfere with other department goals.
Each of the matrix is compared with expansion of 10 different original sequences so you have:
A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, A10
B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B7, B8, B9, B10
C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8, C9, C10
D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10
Certain spots on these may be reserved (Not sure if I should make it just reserved/not reserved or function-based). The reserved spots might be meetings and other events
The sum of each row (for instance all the A's) should be approximately the same within 2%. i.e. sum(A1 through A10) should be approximately the same as (B1 through B10) etc.
The number of rows can vary, so you have for instance:
A1: 5 rows
A2: 5 rows
A3: 1 row, where that single row could for instance be:
0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
etc..
Sub problem*
I'de be very happy to solve only part of the problem. For instance being able to input:
1 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 2 2 3 3 2 3
And get an appropriate array of sequences with 1's and 0's minimized on the number of rows following th constraints above.
Sub-problem solution attempt
Well, here's an idea. This solution is not based on using a genetic algorithm, but some ideas could be used in going in that direction.
Basis vectors
First of all, you should generate what I think of as the basis vectors. For instance, if your sequence were 3 numbers long rather than 15, the basis vectors would be:
v1 = [1 1 0]
v2 = [0 1 1]
v3 = [1 1 1]
Any solution for sequence length 3 would be a linear combination of these three vectors using only positive integers. In other words, the general solution would be
a*v1 + b*v2 + c*v3
where a, b and c are positive integers. For the sequence [1 2 1], the solution is v1 = 1, v2 = 1, v3 = 0. What you first want to do is find all of the possible basis vectors of length 15. From my rough calculations I think that there are somewhere between 300-400 basis vectors of length 15. I can give you some tips towards generating them if you want.
Finding solutions
Now, what you want to do is sort these basis vectors by their sums/magnitudes. Then in searching for your solution, you start with the basis vectors which have the largest sums. We start with the vectors that have the largest sums because they lead to having less total rows. We also have an array, veccoefs, which contains an entry for the linear coefficient for each basis vector. At the beginning of searching for the solution, all the veccoefs are 0.
So we take the first basis vector (the one with the largest sum/magnitude) and subtract this vector from the sequence until we either create an unsolvable result ( having a 0 1 0 in it for instance) or any of the numbers in the result is negative. We store the number of times we subtract the vector in veccoefs. We use the result after subtracting the basis vector from the sequence as the sequence for the next basis vector. If there are only zeros left in the result, then we stop the loop.
I'm not sure of the efficiency/accuracy of this method, but it might at least give you some ideas.
Other possible solutions
Another idea for solving this is to use the basis vectors and form the problem as an optimization/least squares problem. You form a matrix of the basis vectors such that the basic problem will be minimizing Sum[(Ax - b)^2] where A is the matrix of basis vectors, b is the input sequence, and x are the basis vector coefficients. However, you also want to minimize the number of rows, so you can add a term like x^T*x to the minimization function where x^T is the transpose of x. The hard part in my opinion is finding differentiable terms to add that will encourage integer vector coefficients. If you can think of a way to do that, then optimization could very well be a good way to do this.
Also, you might consider a Metropolis-type Monte Carlo solution. You would choose randomly whether to add a vector, remove a vector, or substitute a vector at each step. The vector to be added/removed/substituted would be chosen randomly. The probability of this change to be accepted would be a ratio of the suitabilities of the solutions before the change and after the change. The suitability could be equal to the difference between the current solution and the sequence, squared and summed, minus the number of rows/basis vectors involved in the solution. You would need to put in appropriate constants to for various terms to try to get the acceptance rate around 50%. I kind of doubt that this will work very well, but I thought that you should still consider it when looking for possible solutions.
GA can be applied to this problem, but it won't be 5 minute task. You need to put several things together, without knowing which implementation of each of them is best.
So:
Solution representation - how you will represent possible solution? Using matrix seems to be most straight forward. Using collection of one dimensional arrays is possible also.
But you have some constrains, so maybe SuperGene concept is worth considering?
You must use proper mutation/crossover operators for given gene representation.
How will you enforce constrains on solutions? Destroying those that are not proper? What if they contain valuable information? Maybe let them stay in population but add some penalty to fitness, so they will contribute to offspring, but won't go into next generations?
Anyway I think that GA can be applied to this problem. Is it worth? Usually GA are not best algorithm, but they are decent algorithm if others fail. I would go with GA, just because it would be most fun but I would look for alternative solution (just in case).
P.S. Personal insight: I was solving N Queens Problem, for 70 < N < 100 (board NxN, N queens). Algorithm was working fine for lower N (maybe it was trying all combination?), but with N in this range, I couldn't find proper solution. Fitness quickly jumped to about 90% of max, but in the end there were always two queens conflicting. But it was very naive implementation.