Session 20

A Few Miscellaneous Ideas, in Review


CS 3530
Design and Analysis of Algorithms


Pancakes!

a beautiful stack of pancakes
a stack of pancakes in need of order

These are pancakes, a gaping hole in the "eat a healthy breakfast" story that Mom and Dad like to tell us. [audio]. I'm not good enough a cook to make a perfect stack of pancakes all the same size, like the top photo. Mine are more likely to look like the bottom stack. Still, they are yummy.

Unfortunately, I'm also a little OCD. I like the order and symmetry of having my pancakes in order by size, largest on bottom. That way, the syrup and extra butter will run down and sweeten the whole stack! But my mom won't let me rearrange the pancakes by hand; neither will my wife.

They, however, do let me use a spatula, aka "the flipper". I am able to slip the spatulta under any pancake and flip over the entire stack on top of the spatula. That took a lot of practice! I also have to rearrange the pancakes "in place" -- no extra plate allowed. So I do. (That took even more practice!)

But: how can I do this quickly, before my mom or wife tells me to stop playing with my food? This is your task: help me put my pancakes in order.

You have a stack of n pancakes of all different sizes, in no particular order. You are able to slip a spatula under any pancake and flip over the whole stack that is on the spatula. You would like to arrange my pancakes in order by size, largest on bottom.

Let's proceed in three steps:

  1. Just think for a minute about how you would do this. (It would be great if I could give each of you a stack of pancakes to experiment with!)

  2. Describe to your neighbor how you would do it. See if there is anything in her approach that would improve your own.

  3. Write down your algorithm in pseudocode.

How many times must you flip the pancakes?



Flipping the Pancakes

How would you do it?

This is a great exercise in thinking backwards from a subgoal.

    I want the largest pancake on bottom.
    What action must I take?
    Flip it to the bottom.
    Where must it be in order to do that?
    On top.
    So:
        Find the largest pancake.
        Flip it to the top.
        Flip it to the bottom.

The same process works for the second largest pancake, and the third. After getting a pancake into place, we never mess with that part of the stack. So:

    INPUT : stack of pancakes

    1. while there is a pancake out of order
         choose the largest such pancake
         flip that pancake to the top
         flip that pancake to its correct position

    2. eat pancakes

This is a decrease-and-conquer algorithm. In the worst case, we decrease by one on each step. But really it's a variable decrease algorithm. We can decrease the number of out-of-place pancakes by more than one on any given step.

Sorting pancakes is part of an interesting piece of CS trivia. Bill Gates reputedly wrote only one academic computer science paper, Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal (mirror), which proves bounds for how many flips are needed to sort a stack. The worst case is 2n-3 flips. Let me know if you'd like to learn more...



Exam Review, with Some Lessons

Now, let's review the exam. I'd like to highlight a few key ideas, and perhaps help you understand a couple of techniques better.



Divide-and-Conquer Exponentiation

Design a divide-and-conquer algorithm to compute kn for k > 0 and integer n >= 0.

This is simpler problem than the divide-and-conquer multiplication algorithms we studied in class. How can we divide this problem into two parts? The most natural is:

    kn = kn/2 * kn/2

Quick Exercise: Can we divide-and-conquer on the k? If so, how well does it work?

What is our base case? We are dividing n, so eventually we reach 1. That leaves a single k. So:

    power(k, n)
      if n == 1
         return k
      else
         return power(k, n/2) * power(k, n/2)

That's the basic outline of a solution. The problem says n can be 0, so we need to treat it as a special case. The bigger issue is that n could be odd, in which case this algorithm loses a factor of k. So:

    power(k, n)
      if n == 0           # better factored out, so
         return 1         # that we don't repeat it
      else if n == 1
         return k
      else if n is even
         return power(k, n/2) * power(k, n/2)
      else
         return k * power(k, n/2) * power(k, n/2)

That's a better solution. If we have extra time, how can we improve on this? We are multiplying the sub-results in both arms, and that could be factored out. More importantly, we are making the recursive call twice, and we can get by with one! So:

    power_rec(k, n)
      if n == 1
         return k
      else
         root = power(k, n/2)
         if n is even
            return root * root
         else
            return k * root * root

Here is a Python implementation of the optimal version. If you'd like an implementation of the less optimal version, make it so.

This is straightforward if you know the math, or have reviewed it recently. Computer scientists and programmers need to be able to work with this level of math comfortably.



How Many Multiplications?

Answer these questions about your divide-and-conquer algorithm for Problem 1. Assume that n = 2m for some integer m.

Recurrence relations are still causing many of your problems. The first thing you need to know is how to recognize one. The second is how to construct one. The third is how to solve one. You really have to learn the idea on your own. Let's see if I can help you construct one more reliably, with a little design "recipe". We've seen the recipe for solving relations a few times. Learning that takes practice.

Let's analyze the non-optimized versus of our algorithm above, because that's the one most of you wrote.

First, we set up the recurrence relation for the number of multiplications. Follow these steps:

Notice that the problem lets us assume that n = 2m for some integer m. We don't have to worry about zero or odd exponents other than 1.

This gives us:

    M(1) = 0
    M(n) = 1 + 2M(n/2)

That's what a recurrence relation looks like. When you are asked to create one, this is what you create.

Next, we solve the recurrence relation, to eliminate the recursion and give a closed form solution for the number of multiplications in terms of n. We have seen this recipe before, several times. Follow those same steps.

Starting with n, we substitute previous values recursively until we find a pattern for n-i. Perhaps these sub-steps will help:

In this way, we derive...

    M(1)                       =  0
    M(n)                       =  1 +  2M(n/2)
         = 1 + 2(1 + 2M(n/4))  =  3 +  4M(n/4)
         = 3 + 4(1 + 2M(n/8))  =  7 +  8M(n/8)
         = 7 + 8(1 + 2M(n/16)) = 15 + 16M(n/16)

Notice that we do not work forward from the base case. Doing so can be quite helpful while experimenting, but we solve the relations to-down. It is often possible in practice to work the other direction, but I have never seen a student do it successfully on an exam.

Do you see the pattern yet? For an integer i, on line i of the definition of M(n), we see (2i-1) + 2iM(n/2i). This requires a bigger step from the problems we've seen in class, but it's still basic exponents.

This pattern allows us to generalize the definition of our recurrence relation. We are left with...

    M(1) = 0
    M(n) = (2i-1) + 2iM(n/2i)

Once we have a pattern for n-i, we need to substitute a value for i that turns the recursive case into the base case. You can proceed with very small steps:

In essence, this process answers the question, "How many times would I have to keep substituting into the recurrence before I reach the base case?"

Here, the base case is n = 1, and the general term is n/2i. So:

    n/2i = 1
    2i = n
    log 2i = log n
    i * log 2 = log n
    i = log n

In simpler cases, solving for i gives us n or n-1. But here we need a value that, when 2 is raised to the power, gives us n. That is precisely what "log n" means!

So we plug that value in for i and simplify the recursive case:

    M(1) = 0
    M(n) = (2i-1) + 2iM(n/2i)
           ...
               [substitute i = log n]
           ...
         = (n-1) + nM(n/n)
         = (n-1) + nM(1)
         = (n-1)

And we have solved the recurrence relation. Now we can think about the algorithm.

This algorithm performs n-1 multiplications and is O(n) -- exactly like the straightforward loop.

How can this be the case? We only go through log n steps in this algorithm, not n steps. But recall that our algorithm makes two recursive calls on each pass. The result is full binary tree of multiplications: n leaves and... n-1 internal nodes. That's where the multiplication is done.

Can we do better? Yes, we already did -- with our optimized algorithm above.

Quick Exercise: Write and solve the recurrence relation for our final algorithm above.

Do it now. Really.

No. Really.

This problem demonstrates the relationship between trees and sequences, and the fine line between a really good idea and an unfortunate implementation. It also shows why you want to be able to solve recurrence relations, so that you can do a sanity-check on your algorithms before investing too much time in code.

Here is a Python implementation of the optimal algorithm, tooled to count the multiplication operation. This can help you confirm just how few times the algorithm has to multiply.



Tracing Code

Trace this algorithm for the input [89 45 68 90 29] and write down the following information just before executing Line 7 on each pass:

I can't overstate the power of tracing code. It is an essential skill for debugging. It can also help you understand a program, by seeing the patterns that occur in the data. Practice tracing code as much as you can while studying both algorithms and programs. Practice, practice, practice.

Note two key parts of the question:

Show code. Insert prints to give us the state of the array.

Here is a Python implementation of the code, tooled with a print statement that shows us the state of the array at the desired spot. Can you add code to count the value comparisons for us?



Partitions

Consider the partition problem: Given n positive integers, partition them into two disjoint subsets such that, when we sum the elements in each subset, the two sums are equal.

This problem is hard because there are 2n subsets of a set of n items. For each of them, we need to sum its members and sum the member of its complement. With brute force, this will take O(2n) time.

At least we can avoid also using O(2n) space. In Session 15, we saw techniques for working with permutations represented as O(n) arrays of arrays. Session 16 talked about ways to adapt these ideas for working with subsets.

Read the assignment. Good answers to this question indicate at least familiarity with those ideas, if not a mastery of them.

We do have a couple of ways to speed things up, if only marginally.



Problem 5

Suppose we are given an array A[0..n-1] of integers, in no particular order. Suppose further that we have an operator reverse(j) that can reverse the integers in slots 0 through j in a single step.

Design a decrease-and-conquer algorithm to sort the array.

Yes, this is Pancakes.

Again, this is a great exercise in thinking backwards from a subgoal. The subgoal becomes the invariant that our algorithm must satisfy, offered as a hint in the problem:

After k steps, the largest k numbers are in their correct positions.

On each pass through the loop, we need to find the largest number in the unsorted portion of the array, reverse it to the front of the array, and then reverse it to its correct position.

Here is a Python implementation of a solution, which is an array-based version of our solution to the pancake problem above. It includes a print statement to show that the invariant holds.

Could such a sort ever be useful? yes, indeed. It's perhaps not as useful these days when working with arrays, but think doubly-linked list...



Wrap Up



Eugene Wallingford ..... wallingf@cs.uni.edu ..... April 16, 2014