How to find all the palindromes in a large array? - arrays

Question

I need to find all the palindromes of π with 50 million digits 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286... (goes on and on...)
I've stored all the digits of π in a char array. Now I need to search and count the number of 'palindromes' of length 2 to 15. For example, 535, 979, 33, 88, 14941, etc. are all valid results.
The final output I want is basically like the following.
Palindrome length Number of Palindromes of this length
-----------------------------------------------------------------
2 1234 (just an example)
3 1245
4 689
... ...
... ...
... ...
... ...
15 0
pseudocode of my logic so far - it works but takes forever
//store all digits in a char array
char *piArray = (char *)malloc(NUM_PI_DIGITS * sizeof(char));
int count = 0; //count for the number of palindromes
//because we only need to find palindroms that are 2 - 15 digits long
for(int i = 2; i <= 15; i++){
//loop through the piArray and find all the palindromes with i digits long
for(int j = 0; j < size_of_piArray; j++){
//check if the the sub array piArray[j:j+i] is parlindrom, if so, add a count
bool isPalindrome = true;
for (int k = 0; k < i / 2; k++)
{
if (piArray [j + k] != piArray [j + i - 1 - k])
{
isPalindrom = false;
break;
}
}
if(isPalindrome){
count++;
}
}
}
The problem I am facing now is that it takes too long to loop through the array of this large size (15-2)=13 times. Is there any better way to do this?

Answer 1

Here is a C version adapted from the approach proposed by Caius Jard:
void check_pi_palindromes(int NUM_PI_DIGITS, int max_length, int counts[]) {
// store all digits in a char array
int max_span = max_length / 2;
int start = max_span;
int end = NUM_PI_DIGITS + max_span;
char *pi = (char *)malloc(max_span + NUM_PI_DIGITS + max_span);
// read of generate the digits starting at position `max_span`
[...]
// clear an initial and trailing area to simplify boundary testing
memset(pi, ' ', start);
memset(pi + end, ' ', max_span);
// clear the result array
for (int i = 0; i <= max_length; i++) {
count[i] = 0;
}
// loop through the pi array and find all the palindromes
for (int i = start; i < end; i++) {
if (pi[i + 1] == pi[i - 1]) { //center of an odd length palindrome
count[3]++;
for (n = 2; n <= max_span && pi[i + n] == pi[i - n]; n++) {
count[n * 2 + 1]++;
}
}
if (pi[i] == pi[i - 1]) { //center of an even length palindrome
count[2]++;
for (n = 1; n <= max_span && pi[i + n] == pi[i - n]; n++) {
count[n * 2]++;
}
}
}
}
For each position in the array, it scans in both directions for palindromes of odd and even lengths with these advantages:
single pass through the array
good cache locality because all reads from the array are in a small span from the current position
fewer tests as larger palindromes are only tested as extensions of smaller ones.
A small working prefix and suffix is used to avoid the need to special case the beginning and end of the sequence.

Answer 2

I can't solve it for C, as I'm a C# dev but I expect the conversion will be trivial - I've tried to keep it as basic as possible
char[] pi = "3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286".ToCharArray(); //get a small piece as an array of char
int[] lenCounts = new int[16]; //make a new int array with slots 0-15
for(int i = 1; i < pi.Length-1; i++){
if(pi[i+1] == pi[i-1]){ //center of an odd length pal
int n = 2;
while(pi[i+n] == pi[i-n] && n <= 7) n++;
lenCounts[((n-1)*2+1)]++;
} else if(pi[i] == pi[i-1]){ //center of an even length pal
int n = 1;
while(pi[i+n] == pi[i-1-n] && n <= 7) n++;
lenCounts[n*2]++;
}
}
This demonstrates the "crawl the string looking for a palindrome center then crawl away from it in both directions looking for equal chars" technique..
..the only thing I'm not sure on, and it has occurred in the Pi posted, is what you want to do if palindromes overlap:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286
This contains 939 and overlapping with it, 3993. The algo above will find both, so if overlaps are not to be allowed then you might need to extend it to deal with eliminating earlier palindromes if they're overlapped by a longer one found later
You can play with the c# version at https://dotnetfiddle.net/tkQzBq - it has some debug print lines in too. Fiddles are limited to a 10 second execution time so I don't know if you'll be able to time the full 50 megabyte 😀 - you might have to run this algo locally for that one
Edit: fixed a bug in the answer but I haven't fixed it in the fiddle; I did have while(.. n<lenCounts.Length) i.e. allowing n to reach 15, but that would be an issue because it's in both directions.. nshould go to 7 to remain in range of the counts array. I've patched that by hard coding 7 but you might want to make it dependent on array length/2 etc

Answer 3

Well, I think it can't be done less than O(len*n), and that you are doing this O(len^2*n), where 2 <= len <= 15, is almost the same since the K coefficient doesn't change the O notation in this case, but if you want to avoid this extra loop, you can check these links, it shouldn't be hard to add a counter for each length since these codes are counting all of them, with maximum possible length:
source1, source2, source3.
NOTE: Mostly it's better to reach out GeekForGeeks when you are looking for algorithms or optimizations.
EDIT: one of the possible ways with O(n^2) time complexity and O(n)
Auxiliary Space. You can change unordered_map by array if you wish, anyway here the key will be the length and the value will be the count of palindromes with that length.
unordered_map<int, int> countPalindromes(string& s) {
unordered_map<int, int> m;
for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
// check for odd length palindromes
for (int j = 0; j <= i; j++) {
if (!s[i + j])
break;
if (s[i - j] == s[i + j]) {
// check for palindromes of length
// greater than 1
if ((i + j + 1) - (i - j) > 1)
m[(i + j + 1) - (i - j)]++;
} else
break;
}
// check for even length palindromes
for (int j = 0; j <= i; j++) {
if (!s[i + j + 1])
break;
if (s[i - j] == s[i + j + 1]) {
// check for palindromes of length
// greater than 1
if ((i + j + 2) - (i - j) > 1)
m[(i + j + 2) - (i - j)]++;
} else
break;
}
}
return m;
}