Solution for checking repetitive elements in the matrix[1000][1000] - c

Need to write function for checking repetitive elements in the matrix[1000][1000]. Return True if found any repetitive elements, and False if not.
I think need to make the solution with two steps:
1. Sort every elements in the matrix from smaller to bigger (during sorting we can check the elements on equality) Using merge sort for example.
2. Compare previous and next element one by one from first to last element in the matrix.
Is efficiency of this solution good enough?

This is the element distinctness problem, and it does not seem it is important that your array is 2D, you can regard it as a "regular" array, and solve it with the "regular" solution of element distinctness, which is:
Sort the array, then iterate the elements and check if there is an index i such that arr[i] == arr[i+1].
This solution is O(nlogn) time, assuming efficient sort, with little extra space needed.
Store the elements in a hash-set, and when inserting each element - check if the element already exists in the set.
This solution is O(n) time on average, and O(n^2) time worst case, and needs O(n) extra space.

Related

Is it possible to remove duplicates from an unsorted array in O(n) time, O(1) space complexity, using the Floyd's tortoise and hare algorithm?

Is it possible to remove duplicates from an unsorted array in O(n) time, O(1) space complexity, using the Floyd's tortoise and hare algorithm?
Consider the array [3,1,3,4,2]. After removing duplicates, the function "remove_dups" must return [3,1,4,2]. Also, the function should work on negative integers in the array.
Yes it is possible. The idea is to consider array items as linked list nodes. Any particular index is pointing to the value at that index.
And you will see that there is loop in case of duplicate, two indexes will have same value, and they will form a cycle just like in the image given below.
Example:
1->2->3->4->5->6->3
So we can find the entry point of cycle in the linked list and that will be our duplicate element.
Source : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-duplicates-constant-array-elements-0-n-1-o1-space/

How many comparisons does insertion sort do in an already-ordered 2-element array?

The best case scenario of insertion sort is meant to be O(n), however, if you have 2 elements in an array that are already sorted, such as 10 and 11, doesn't it only make one comparison rather than 2?
Time complexity of O(n) does not mean that the number of steps is exactly n, it means that the number of steps is dominated by a linear function. Basically, sorting twice as many elements should take at most twice as much time for large numbers.
The best case scenario for insert sort is when you can insert the new element after just one comparison. This can happen in only 2 cases:
You are inserting elements in from a reverse sorted list and you compare the new element with the first element of the target list.
You are inserting elements from a sorted list and you compare the new element with the last one of the target list.
In these 2 cases, each new element is inserted after just one comparison, including in the case you mention.
The time complexity would be indeed O(n) for these very special cases. You do not need such a favorable case for this complexity, the time complexity will be O(n) if there is a constant upper bound for the number of comparisons independent of the list length.
Note that it is a common optimization to try and handle sorted lists in an optimized way. If the optimization mentioned in the second paragraph above is not implemented, sorting an already sorted list would be the worst case scenario, with n comparisons for the insertion of the n+1th element.
In the general case, insertion sort on lists has a time complexity of O(n2), but careful implementation can produce an optimal solution for already sorted lists.
Note that this is true for lists where inserting at any position has a constant cost, insertion sort on arrays does not have this property. It can still be optimized to handle these special cases, but not both at the same time.
Insertion sort does N - 1 comparisons if the input is already sorted.
This is because for every element it compares it with a previous element and does something if the order is not right (it is not important what it does now, because the order is always right). So you will do this N - 1 times.
So it looks like you have to understand a big O notation. Because O(n) does not mean n operations, it does not even mean close to n operations (n/10^9 is O(n) and it is not really close to n). All it mean that the function approximately linear (think about it as limit where n-> inf).

Sorting an array which is already sorted, Except one element which is out of order

I was preparing for a competition and came across this question, which I can't comprehend.
Consider a set of 'n' elements in an array, which is sorted except for one element that appears out of order. which of the following sort sequence takes O(n) time?
Quick Sort
Heap Sort
Merge Sort
Bubble Sort
Now I already know the best method would be to use Insertion sort which would take O(n) time in this case but since its telling other than that, I'm not sure which to use.
Quick sort will be real bad since the array is already sorted.
Heap sort will not exactly utilize the property that the array is sorted and will take O(nlogn) time.
Merge sort also takes O(nlogn) as it doesn't discriminate the input ordering.
Bubble sort would also take O(n^2).
Would really like some help here , Am I missing something?
The natural variant of merge sort will sort the described list in O(n) time.
It works the same as merge sort but begins by identifying natural runs in the data. So it will identify the two runs (sorted groups) around the unsorted element, then merge the unsorted element into one of the runs, then merge the two runs together. This only requires two O(n) merges (plus some O(n) run detection), no matter the size of the data, so it's O(n).
Insertion sort would still take O(n^2) because it won't check that the array is sorted. The best solution would be bubble sort as it would scan the array twice: the first time it would move the element to its correct place and the second time it would realize the array is sorted. keeps track of the number of swaps it makes at every iteration.
Unfortunately it is not as simple as this; it depends on the location of the unsorted item with respect to its correct place. The solution provided by AndyG would make it O(n) in all cases.
If there is exactly one element out of order, you could find it and then insert it at the correct place -> O(n) effort.

Quickest way to find 5 largest values in an array of structs

I have an array of structs called struct Test testArray[25].
The Test struct contains a member called int size.
What is the fastest way to get another array of Test structs that contain all from the original excluding the 5 largest, based on the member size? WITHOUT modifying the original array.
NOTE: Amount of items in the array can be much larger, was just using this for testing and the values could be dynamic. Just wanted a slower subset for testing.
I was thinking of making a copy of the original testArray and then sorting that array. Then return an array of Test structs that did not contain the top 5 or bottom 5 (depending on asc or desc).
OR
Iterating through the testArray looking for the largest 5 and then making a copy of the original array excluding the largest 5. This way seems like it would iterate through the array too many times comparing to the array of 5 largest that had been found.
Follow up question:
Here is what i am doing now, let me know what you think?
Considering the number of largest elements i am interested in is going to remain the same, i am iterating through the array and getting the largest element and swapping it to the front of the array. Then i skip the first element and look for the largest after that and swap it into the second index... so on so forth. Until i have the first 5 largest. Then i stop sorting and just copy the sixth index to the end into a new array.
This way, no matter what, i only iterate through the array 5 times. And i do not have to sort the whole thing.
Partial Sorting with a linear time selection algorithm will do this in O(n) time, where sorting would be O(nlogn).
To quote the Partial Sorting page:
The linear-time selection algorithm described above can be used to find the k smallest or the k largest elements in worst-case linear time O(n). To find the k smallest elements, find the kth smallest element using the linear-time median-of-medians selection algorithm. After that, partition the array with the kth smallest element as pivot. The k smallest elements will be the first k elements.
You can find the k largest items in O(n), although making a copy of the array or an array of pointers to each element (smarter) will cost you some time as well, but you have to do that regardless.
If you'd like me to give a complete explanation of the algorithm involved, just comment.
Update:
Regarding your follow up question, which basically suggests iterating over the list five times... that will work. But it iterates over the list more times than you need to. Finding the k largest elements in one pass (using an O(n) selection algorithm) is much better than that. That way you iterate once to make your new array, and once more to do the selection (if you use median-of-medians, you will not need to iterate a third time to remove the five largest items as you can just split the working array into two parts based on where the 5th largest item is), rather than iterating once to make your new array and then an additional five times.
As stated sorting is O(nlogn +5) iterating in O(5n + 5). In the general case finding m largest numbers is O(nlog +m) using the sort algorithm and O(mn +m) in the iteration algoritm. The question of which algorithm is better depends on the values of m and n. For a value of five iterating is better for up to 2 to the 5th numbers I.e. a measly 32. However in terms of operations sorting is more intensive than iterating so it'll be quite a bit more until it is faster.
You can do better theoretically by using a sorted srray of the largest numbers so far and binary search to maintain the order that will give you O(nlogm) but that again depends on the values of n and m.
Maybe an array isn't the best structure for what you want. Specially since you need to sort it every time a new value is added. Maybe a linked list is better, with a sort on insert (which is O(N) on the worst case and O(1) in the best), then just discard the last five elements. Also, you have to consider that just switching a pointer is considerably faster than reallocating the entire array just get another element in there.
Why not an AVL Tree? Traverse time is O(log2N), but you have to consider the time of rebalancing the tree, and if the time spent coding that is worth it.
With usage of min-heap data structure and set heap size to 5, you can traverse the array and insert into heap when the minimum element of heap is less than the element in the array.
getMin takes O(1) time and insertion takes O(log(k)) time where k is the element size of heap (in our case it is 5). So in the worst case we have complexity O(n*log(k)) to find max 5 elements. Another O(n) will take to get the excluded list.

Find the one non-repeating element in array?

I have an array of n elements in which only one element is not repeated, else all the other numbers are repeated >1 times. And there is no limit on the range of the numbers in the array.
Some solutions are:
Making use of hash, but that would result in linear time complexity but very poor space complexity
Sorting the list using MergeSort O(nlogn) and then finding the element which doesn't repeat
Is there a better solution?
One general approach is to implement a bucketing technique (of which hashing is such a technique) to distribute the elements into different "buckets" using their identity (say index) and then find the bucket with the smallest size (1 in your case). This problem, I believe, is also known as the minority element problem. There will be as many buckets as there are unique elements in your set.
Doing this by hashing is problematic because of collisions and how your algorithm might handle that. Certain associative array approaches such as tries and extendable hashing don't seem to apply as they are better suited to strings.
One application of the above is to the Union-Find data structure. Your sets will be the buckets and you'll need to call MakeSet() and Find() for each element in your array for a cost of $O(\alpha(n))$ per call, where $\alpha(n)$ is the extremely slow-growing inverse Ackermann function. You can think of it as being effectively a constant.
You'll have to do Union when an element already exist. With some changes to keep track of the set with minimum cardinality, this solution should work. The time complexity of this solution is $O(n\alpha(n))$.
Your problem also appears to be loosely related to the Element Uniqueness problem.
Try a multi-pass scanning if you have strict space limitation.
Say the input has n elements and you can only hold m elements in your memory. If you use a hash-table approach, in the worst case you need to handle n/2 unique numbers so you want m>n/2. In case you don't have that big m, you can partition n elements to k=(max(input)-min(input))/(2m) groups, and go ahead scan the n input elements k times (in the worst case):
1st run: you only hash-get/put/mark/whatever elements with value < min(input)+m*2; because in the range (min(input), min(input)+m*2) there are at most m unique elements and you can handle that. If you are lucky you already find the unique one, otherwise continue.
2nd run: only operate on elements with value in range (min(input)+m*2, min(input)+m*4), and
so on, so forth
In this way, you compromise the time complexity to a O(kn), but you get a space complexity bound of O(m)
Two ideas come to my mind:
A smoothsort may be a better alternative than the cited mergesort for your needs given it's O(1) in memory usage, O(nlogn) in the worst case as the merge sort but O(n) in the best case;
Based on the (reverse) idea of the splay tree, you could make a type of tree that would
push the leafs toward the bottom once they are used (instead of upward as in the splay tree). This would still give you a O(nlogn) implantation of the sort, but the advantage would be the O(1) step of finding the unique element, it would be the root. The sorting algorithm is the sum of O(nlogn) + O(n) and this algorithm would be O(nlogn) + O(1)
Otherwise, as you stated, using a hash based solution (like hash-implemented set) would result in a O(n) algorithm (O(n) to insert and add a counting reference to it and O(n) to traverse your set to find the unique element) but you seemed to dislike the memory usage, though I don't know why. Memory is cheap, these days...

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