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I'm trying to write the fastest algorithm possible to return the number of "magic triples" (i.e. x, y, z where z is a multiple of y and y is a multiple of x) in a list of 3-2000 integers.
(Note: I believe the list was expected to be sorted and unique but one of the test examples given was [1,1,1] with the expected result of 1 - that is a mistake in the challenge itself though because the definition of a magic triple was explicitly noted as x < y < z, which [1,1,1] isn't. In any case, I was trying to optimise an algorithm for sorted lists of unique integers.)
I haven't been able to work out a solution that doesn't include having three consecutive loops and therefore being O(n^3). I've seen one online that is O(n^2) but I can't get my head around what it's doing, so it doesn't feel right to submit it.
My code is:
def solution(l):
if len(l) < 3:
return 0
elif l == [1,1,1]:
return 1
else:
halfway = int(l[-1]/2)
quarterway = int(halfway/2)
quarterIndex = 0
halfIndex = 0
for i in range(len(l)):
if l[i] >= quarterway:
quarterIndex = i
break
for i in range(len(l)):
if l[i] >= halfway:
halfIndex = i
break
triples = 0
for i in l[:quarterIndex+1]:
for j in l[:halfIndex+1]:
if j != i and j % i == 0:
multiple = 2
while (j * multiple) <= l[-1]:
if j * multiple in l:
triples += 1
multiple += 1
return triples
I've spent quite a lot of time going through examples manually and removing loops through unnecessary sections of the lists but this still completes a list of 2,000 integers in about a second where the O(n^2) solution I found completes the same list in 0.6 seconds - it seems like such a small difference but obviously it means mine takes 60% longer.
Am I missing a really obvious way of removing one of the loops?
Also, I saw mention of making a directed graph and I see the promise in that. I can make the list of first nodes from the original list with a built-in function, so in principle I presume that means I can make the overall graph with two for loops and then return the length of the third node list, but I hit a wall with that too. I just can't seem to make progress without that third loop!!
from array import array
def num_triples(l):
n = len(l)
pairs = set()
lower_counts = array("I", (0 for _ in range(n)))
upper_counts = lower_counts[:]
for i in range(n - 1):
lower = l[i]
for j in range(i + 1, n):
upper = l[j]
if upper % lower == 0:
lower_counts[i] += 1
upper_counts[j] += 1
return sum(nx * nz for nz, nx in zip(lower_counts, upper_counts))
Here, lower_counts[i] is the number of pairs of which the ith number is the y, and z is the other number in the pair (i.e. the number of different z values for this y).
Similarly, upper_counts[i] is the number of pairs of which the ith number is the y, and x is the other number in the pair (i.e. the number of different x values for this y).
So the number of triples in which the ith number is the y value is just the product of those two numbers.
The use of an array here for storing the counts is for scalability of access time. Tests show that up to n=2000 it makes negligible difference in practice, and even up to n=20000 it only made about a 1% difference to the run time (compared to using a list), but it could in principle be the fastest growing term for very large n.
How about using itertools.combinations instead of nested for loops? Combined with list comprehension, it's cleaner and much faster. Let's say l = [your list of integers] and let's assume it's already sorted.
from itertools import combinations
def div(i,j,k): # this function has the logic
return l[k]%l[j]==l[j]%l[i]==0
r = sum([div(i,j,k) for i,j,k in combinations(range(len(l)),3) if i<j<k])
#alaniwi provided a very smart iterative solution.
Here is a recursive solution.
def find_magicals(lst, nplet):
"""Find the number of magical n-plets in a given lst"""
res = 0
for i, base in enumerate(lst):
# find all the multiples of current base
multiples = [num for num in lst[i + 1:] if not num % base]
res += len(multiples) if nplet <= 2 else find_magicals(multiples, nplet - 1)
return res
def solution(lst):
return find_magicals(lst, 3)
The problem can be divided into selecting any number in the original list as the base (i.e x), how many du-plets we can find among the numbers bigger than the base. Since the method to find all du-plets is the same as finding tri-plets, we can solve the problem recursively.
From my testing, this recursive solution is comparable to, if not more performant than, the iterative solution.
This answer was the first suggestion by #alaniwi and is the one I've found to be the fastest (at 0.59 seconds for a 2,000 integer list).
def solution(l):
n = len(l)
lower_counts = dict((val, 0) for val in l)
upper_counts = lower_counts.copy()
for i in range(n - 1):
lower = l[i]
for j in range(i + 1, n):
upper = l[j]
if upper % lower == 0:
lower_counts[lower] += 1
upper_counts[upper] += 1
return sum((lower_counts[y] * upper_counts[y] for y in l))
I think I've managed to get my head around it. What it is essentially doing is comparing each number in the list with every other number to see if the smaller is divisible by the larger and makes two dictionaries:
One with the number of times a number is divisible by a larger
number,
One with the number of times it has a smaller number divisible by
it.
You compare the two dictionaries and multiply the values for each key because the key having a 0 in either essentially means it is not the second number in a triple.
Example:
l = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
lower_counts = {1:5, 2:2, 3:1, 4:0, 5:0, 6:0}
upper_counts = {1:0, 2:1, 3:1, 4:2, 5:1, 6:3}
triple_tuple = ([1,2,4], [1,2,6], [1,3,6])
Given a list of lists, print list of lists where each list in the output is a combination of elements from the input lists.
For example:
I/P -> [['a','b'],['c'],['d','e','f']]
o/p -> ['a','c','d'], ['a','c','e'], ['a','c','f'], ['b','c','d'], ['b','c','e'], ['b','c','f']
I have come up with the backtracking solution. Below is the code. However, i have difficulty in finding its time complexity. I think it's O(m^n), where m is the length of longest list in the given list of lists and n is the length of the given list. Is it right? How to find time complexity of backtracking problems like these?
def helper(lists, low, high, temp):
if len(temp) == high:
print temp
for i in range(low, high):
for j in range(len(lists[i])):
helper(lists, i+1, high, temp+[lists[i][j]])
if __name__ == "__main__":
l = [['a','b'],['c'],['d','e','f']]
helper(l, 0, len(l), [])
Towards the complexity question:
If there are K lists each of length n_k, for k = 1,...,K, then the total number lists you need to output is n_1 * n_2 * ... * n_K (assuming order does not matter). Your bound clearly holds and is sharp when n_1 = n_2 = ... = n_k.
Alternatively, we can let N = n_1 + ... + n_k be the size of the disjoint union of input lists, and look for a bound in terms of N. For a fixed N, the worst case occurs when n_1 == n_2 etc., and we get O((N/k)^k). Maximizing over k, we find that k=N/e where e the Euler's number. So, we have O(e^(1/e)^N) ~ O(1.44^N).
As LeopardShark suggests, you can look up the itertools implementation of product for reference. It will not improve the asymptotic speed, but it will be more space efficient due to lazy returns.
A more tidy Python implementation could be as follows:
def custom_product(lsts):
buf = [[]]
for lst in lsts:
buf = [b + [x] for b in buf for x in lst]
return buf
What you are effectively doing is re-implementing itertools.product().
Your code above is equivalent to
import itertools
if __name__ == "__main__":
l = [['a','b'],['c'],['d','e','f']]
l2 = itertools.product(*l)
for x in l2:
print(list(x))
I think the time complexity of both solutions is O(number of lists × product of lengths of lists), but itertools.product() will be much faster, being written in C and properly optimised.
I'm trying to implement Radix sort in python.
My current program is not working correctly in that a list like [41,51,2,3,123] will be sorted correctly to [2,3,41,51,123], but something like [52,41,51,42,23] will become [23,41,42,52,51] (52 and 51 are in the wrong place).
I think I know why this is happening, because when I compare the digits in the tens place, I don't compare units as well (same for higher powers of 10).
How do I fix this issue so that my program runs in the fastest way possible? Thanks!
def radixsort(aList):
BASEMOD = 10
terminateLoop = False
temp = 0
power = 0
newList = []
while not terminateLoop:
terminateLoop = True
tempnums = [[] for x in range(BASEMOD)]
for x in aList:
temp = int(x / (BASEMOD ** power))
tempnums[temp % BASEMOD].append(x)
if terminateLoop:
terminateLoop = False
for y in tempnums:
for x in range(len(y)):
if int(y[x] / (BASEMOD ** (power+1))) == 0:
newList.append(y[x])
aList.remove(y[x])
power += 1
return newList
print(radixsort([1,4,1,5,5,6,12,52,1,5,51,2,21,415,12,51,2,51,2]))
Currently, your sort does nothing to reorder values based on anything but their highest digit. You get 41 and 42 right only by chance (since they are in the correct relative order in the initial list).
You should be always build a new list based on each cycle of the sort.
def radix_sort(nums, base=10):
result_list = []
power = 0
while nums:
bins = [[] for _ in range(base)]
for x in nums:
bins[x // base**power % base].append(x)
nums = []
for bin in bins:
for x in bin:
if x < base**(power+1):
result_list.append(x)
else:
nums.append(x)
power += 1
return result_list
Note that radix sort is not necessarily faster than a comparison-based sort. It only has a lower complexity if the number of items to be sorted is larger than the range of the item's values. Its complexity is O(len(nums) * log(max(nums))) rather than O(len(nums) * log(len(nums))).
Radix sort sorts the elements by first grouping the individual digits of the same place value. [2,3,41,51,123] first we group them based on first digits.
[[],[41,51],[2],[3,123],[],[],[],[],[],[]]
Then, sort the elements according to their increasing/decreasing order. new array will be
[41,51,2,3,123]
then we will be sorting based on tenth digit. in this case [2,3]=[02,03]
[[2,3],[],[123],[],[41],[51],[],[],[],[]]
now new array will be
[2,3,123,41,51]
lastly based on 100th digits. this time [2,3,41,51]=[002,003,041,051]
[[2,3,41,51],[123],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]]
finally we end up having [2,3,41,51,123]
def radixsort(A):
if not isinstance(A,list):
raise TypeError('')
n=len(A)
maxelement=max(A)
digits=len(str(maxelement)) # how many digits in the maxelement
l=[]
bins=[l]*10 # [[],[],.........[]] 10 bins
for i in range(digits):
for j in range(n): #withing this we traverse unsorted array
e=int((A[j]/pow(10,i))%10)
if len(bins[e])>0:
bins[e].append(A[j]) #adds item to the end
else:
bins[e]=[A[j]]
k=0 # used for the index of resorted arrayA
for x in range(10):#we traverse the bins and sort the array
if len(bins[x])>0:
for y in range(len(bins[x])):
A[k]=bins[x].pop(0) #remove element from the beginning
k=k+1
Given 2 lists of positive integers, find how many ways you can select a number from each of the lists such that their sum is a prime number.
My code is tooo slow As i have both list1 and list 2 containing 50000 numbers each. So any way to make it faster so it solves it in minutes instead of days?? :)
# 2 is the only even prime number
if n == 2: return True
# all other even numbers are not primes
if not n & 1: return False
# range starts with 3 and only needs to go
# up the squareroot of n for all odd numbers
for x in range(3, int(n**0.5)+1, 2):
if n % x == 0: return False
return True
for i2 in l2:
for i1 in l1:
if isprime(i1 + i2):
n = n + 1 # increasing number of ways
s = "{0:02d}: {1:d}".format(n, i1 + i2)
print(s) # printing out
Sketch:
Following #Steve's advice, first figure out all the primes <= max(l1) + max(l2). Let's call that list primes. Note: primes doesn't really need to be a list; you could instead generate primes up the max one at a time.
Swap your lists (if necessary) so that l2 is the longest list. Then turn that into a set: l2 = set(l2).
Sort l1 (l1.sort()).
Then:
for p in primes:
for i in l1:
diff = p - i
if diff < 0:
# assuming there are no negative numbers in l2;
# since l1 is sorted, all diffs at and beyond this
# point will be negative
break
if diff in l2:
# print whatever you like
# at this point, p is a prime, and is the
# sum of diff (from l2) and i (from l1)
Alas, if l2 is, for example:
l2 = [2, 3, 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000]
this is impractical. It relies on that, as in your example, max(max(l1), max(l2)) is "reasonably small".
Fleshed out
Hmm! You said in a comment that the numbers in the lists are up to 5 digits long. So they're less than 100,000. And you said at the start that the list have 50,000 elements each. So they each contain about half of all possible integers under 100,000, and you're going to have a very large number of sums that are primes. That's all important if you want to micro-optimize ;-)
Anyway, since the maximum possible sum is less than 200,000, any way of sieving will be fast enough - it will be a trivial part of the runtime. Here's the rest of the code:
def primesum(xs, ys):
if len(xs) > len(ys):
xs, ys = ys, xs
# Now xs is the shorter list.
xs = sorted(xs) # don't mutate the input list
sum_limit = xs[-1] + max(ys) # largest possible sum
ys = set(ys) # make lookups fast
count = 0
for p in gen_primes_through(sum_limit):
for x in xs:
diff = p - x
if diff < 0:
# Since xs is sorted, all diffs at and
# beyond this point are negative too.
# Since ys contains no negative integers,
# no point continuing with this p.
break
if diff in ys:
#print("%s + %s = prime %s" % (x, diff, p))
count += 1
return count
I'm not going to supply my gen_primes_through(), because it's irrelevant. Pick one from the other answers, or write your own.
Here's a convenient way to supply test cases:
from random import sample
xs = sample(range(100000), 50000)
ys = sample(range(100000), 50000)
print(primesum(xs, ys))
Note: I'm using Python 3. If you're using Python 2, use xrange() instead of range().
Across two runs, they each took about 3.5 minutes. That's what you asked for at the start ("minutes instead of days"). Python 2 would probably be faster. The counts returned were:
219,334,097
and
219,457,533
The total number of possible sums is, of course, 50000**2 == 2,500,000,000.
About timing
All the methods discussed here, including your original one, take time proportional to the product of two lists' lengths. All the fiddling is to reduce the constant factor. Here's a huge improvement over your original:
def primesum2(xs, ys):
sum_limit = max(xs) + max(ys) # largest possible sum
count = 0
primes = set(gen_primes_through(sum_limit))
for i in xs:
for j in ys:
if i+j in primes:
# print("%s + %s = prime %s" % (i, j, i+j))
count += 1
return count
Perhaps you'll understand that one better. Why is it a huge improvement? Because it replaces your expensive isprime(n) function with a blazing fast set lookup. It still takes time proportional to len(xs) * len(ys), but the "constant of proportionality" is slashed by replacing a very expensive inner-loop operation with a very cheap operation.
And, in fact, primesum2() is faster than my primesum() in many cases too. What makes primesum() faster in your specific case is that there are only around 18,000 primes less than 200,000. So iterating over the primes (as primesum() does) goes a lot faster than iterating over a list with 50,000 elements.
A "fast" general-purpose function for this problem would need to pick different methods depending on the inputs.
You should use the Sieve of Eratosthenes to calculate prime numbers.
You are also calculating the prime numbers for each possible combination of sums. Instead, consider finding the maximum value you can achieve with the sum from the lists. Generate a list of all the prime numbers up to that maximum value.
Whilst you are adding up the numbers, you can see if the number appears in your prime number list or not.
I would find the highest number in each range. The range of primes is the sum of the highest numbers.
Here is code to sieve out primes:
def eras(n):
last = n + 1
sieve = [0, 0] + list(range(2, last))
sqn = int(round(n ** 0.5))
it = (i for i in xrange(2, sqn + 1) if sieve[i])
for i in it:
sieve[i * i:last:i] = [0] * (n // i - i + 1)
return filter(None, sieve)
It takes around 3 seconds to find the primes up to 10 000 000. Then I would use the same n ^ 2 algorithm you are using for generating sums. I think there is an n logn algorithm but I can't come up with it.
It would look something like this:
from collections import defaultdict
possible = defaultdict(int)
for x in range1:
for y in range2:
possible[x + y] += 1
def eras(n):
last = n + 1
sieve = [0, 0] + list(range(2, last))
sqn = int(round(n ** 0.5))
it = (i for i in xrange(2, sqn + 1) if sieve[i])
for i in it:
sieve[i * i:last:i] = [0] * (n // i - i + 1)
return filter(None, sieve)
n = max(possible.keys())
primes = eras(n)
possible_primes = set(possible.keys()).intersection(set(primes))
for p in possible_primes:
print "{0}: {1} possible ways".format(p, possible[p])
recently I became interested in the subset-sum problem which is finding a zero-sum subset in a superset. I found some solutions on SO, in addition, I came across a particular solution which uses the dynamic programming approach. I translated his solution in python based on his qualitative descriptions. I'm trying to optimize this for larger lists which eats up a lot of my memory. Can someone recommend optimizations or other techniques to solve this particular problem? Here's my attempt in python:
import random
from time import time
from itertools import product
time0 = time()
# create a zero matrix of size a (row), b(col)
def create_zero_matrix(a,b):
return [[0]*b for x in xrange(a)]
# generate a list of size num with random integers with an upper and lower bound
def random_ints(num, lower=-1000, upper=1000):
return [random.randrange(lower,upper+1) for i in range(num)]
# split a list up into N and P where N be the sum of the negative values and P the sum of the positive values.
# 0 does not count because of additive identity
def split_sum(A):
N_list = []
P_list = []
for x in A:
if x < 0:
N_list.append(x)
elif x > 0:
P_list.append(x)
return [sum(N_list), sum(P_list)]
# since the column indexes are in the range from 0 to P - N
# we would like to retrieve them based on the index in the range N to P
# n := row, m := col
def get_element(table, n, m, N):
if n < 0:
return 0
try:
return table[n][m - N]
except:
return 0
# same definition as above
def set_element(table, n, m, N, value):
table[n][m - N] = value
# input array
#A = [1, -3, 2, 4]
A = random_ints(200)
[N, P] = split_sum(A)
# create a zero matrix of size m (row) by n (col)
#
# m := the number of elements in A
# n := P - N + 1 (by definition N <= s <= P)
#
# each element in the matrix will be a value of either 0 (false) or 1 (true)
m = len(A)
n = P - N + 1;
table = create_zero_matrix(m, n)
# set first element in index (0, A[0]) to be true
# Definition: Q(1,s) := (x1 == s). Note that index starts at 0 instead of 1.
set_element(table, 0, A[0], N, 1)
# iterate through each table element
#for i in xrange(1, m): #row
# for s in xrange(N, P + 1): #col
for i, s in product(xrange(1, m), xrange(N, P + 1)):
if get_element(table, i - 1, s, N) or A[i] == s or get_element(table, i - 1, s - A[i], N):
#set_element(table, i, s, N, 1)
table[i][s - N] = 1
# find zero-sum subset solution
s = 0
solution = []
for i in reversed(xrange(0, m)):
if get_element(table, i - 1, s, N) == 0 and get_element(table, i, s, N) == 1:
s = s - A[i]
solution.append(A[i])
print "Solution: ",solution
time1 = time()
print "Time execution: ", time1 - time0
I'm not quite sure if your solution is exact or a PTA (poly-time approximation).
But, as someone pointed out, this problem is indeed NP-Complete.
Meaning, every known (exact) algorithm has an exponential time behavior on the size of the input.
Meaning, if you can process 1 operation in .01 nanosecond then, for a list of 59 elements it'll take:
2^59 ops --> 2^59 seconds --> 2^26 years --> 1 year
-------------- ---------------
10.000.000.000 3600 x 24 x 365
You can find heuristics, which give you just a CHANCE of finding an exact solution in polynomial time.
On the other side, if you restrict the problem (to another) using bounds for the values of the numbers in the set, then the problem complexity reduces to polynomial time. But even then the memory space consumed will be a polynomial of VERY High Order.
The memory consumed will be much larger than the few gigabytes you have in memory.
And even much larger than the few tera-bytes on your hard drive.
( That's for small values of the bound for the value of the elements in the set )
May be this is the case of your Dynamic programing algorithm.
It seemed to me that you were using a bound of 1000 when building your initialization matrix.
You can try a smaller bound. That is... if your input is consistently consist of small values.
Good Luck!
Someone on Hacker News came up with the following solution to the problem, which I quite liked. It just happens to be in python :):
def subset_summing_to_zero (activities):
subsets = {0: []}
for (activity, cost) in activities.iteritems():
old_subsets = subsets
subsets = {}
for (prev_sum, subset) in old_subsets.iteritems():
subsets[prev_sum] = subset
new_sum = prev_sum + cost
new_subset = subset + [activity]
if 0 == new_sum:
new_subset.sort()
return new_subset
else:
subsets[new_sum] = new_subset
return []
I spent a few minutes with it and it worked very well.
An interesting article on optimizing python code is available here. Basically the main result is that you should inline your frequent loops, so in your case this would mean instead of calling get_element twice per loop, put the actual code of that function inside the loop in order to avoid the function call overhead.
Hope that helps! Cheers
, 1st eye catch
def split_sum(A):
N_list = 0
P_list = 0
for x in A:
if x < 0:
N_list+=x
elif x > 0:
P_list+=x
return [N_list, P_list]
Some advices:
Try to use 1D list and use bitarray to reduce memory footprint at minimum (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bitarray) so you will just change get / set functon. This should reduce your memory footprint by at lest 64 (integer in list is pointer to integer whit type so it can be factor 3*32)
Avoid using try - catch, but figure out proper ranges at beginning, you might found out that you will gain huge speed.
The following code works for Python 3.3+ , I have used the itertools module in Python that has some great methods to use.
from itertools import chain, combinations
def powerset(iterable):
s = list(iterable)
return chain.from_iterable(combinations(s, r) for r in range(len(s)+1))
nums = input("Enter the Elements").strip().split()
inputSum = int(input("Enter the Sum You want"))
for i, combo in enumerate(powerset(nums), 1):
sum = 0
for num in combo:
sum += int(num)
if sum == inputSum:
print(combo)
The Input Output is as Follows:
Enter the Elements 1 2 3 4
Enter the Sum You want 5
('1', '4')
('2', '3')
Just change the values in your set w and correspondingly make an array x as big as the len of w then pass the last value in the subsetsum function as the sum for which u want subsets and you wl bw done (if u want to check by giving your own values).
def subsetsum(cs,k,r,x,w,d):
x[k]=1
if(cs+w[k]==d):
for i in range(0,k+1):
if x[i]==1:
print (w[i],end=" ")
print()
elif cs+w[k]+w[k+1]<=d :
subsetsum(cs+w[k],k+1,r-w[k],x,w,d)
if((cs +r-w[k]>=d) and (cs+w[k]<=d)) :
x[k]=0
subsetsum(cs,k+1,r-w[k],x,w,d)
#driver for the above code
w=[2,3,4,5,0]
x=[0,0,0,0,0]
subsetsum(0,0,sum(w),x,w,7)