## Saturday, December 13, 2014

### Problem discussion: ShufflingCardsDiv2 - Topcoder SRM 641 900pt

Topcoder SRM 641 happened a few days ago and featured an unusually easy problem set for division 2. Before continuing reading the post, please read the problem statement (login required).

Now that you have read the problem statement, let me state the most important fact in the problem statement

The cards are shuffled exactly twice.

This is very important because it makes the problem much easier. Since there are only two shuffles, there are a limited number of steps to be followed.

Let’s analyze the shuffling procedure closely. In the beginning we have $$2N$$ cards numbered from $$1$$ to $$2N$$. These cards are divided into two piles: one containing the first half cards $$1 \cdots N$$ and the other containing the remaining cards. Let’s denote the cards which have number less than or equal to $$N$$ as $$A$$ and the others as $$B$$. Now, the two piles will look like this

$$\text{A A A A A …}$$
$$\text{B B B B B …}$$

After performing the interleaving, we will get a deck that looks like

$$\text{A B A B A B A B A B . . .}$$

Now, we need to shuffle this deck again. Let’s assume that $$N$$ is even. (We will cover the odd case later.) Divide the deck into two piles.

$$\text{A B A B A B …}$$
$$\text{A B A B A B …}$$

The result after interleaving the above piles is given to us as input. Note that the two piles shown above are not exact i.e for any of the above piles we can take any permutation of the cards for interleaving. But, one condition still holds:

In any pile, the number of $$A$$s is equal to the number of $$B$$s.

After interleaving, all cards in the top pile will appear at even indices (assuming 0-based indexing). So, we need to check all even indices of the given array/vector and count the number of $$A$$s and $$B$$s. If they are equal, then return "Possible" otherwise return "Impossible".

As I have said before, this solution is valid only if $$N$$ is even. When $$N$$ is odd the number of $$A$$s and $$B$$s need not be same. In fact, the number of $$A$$s will be 1 greater than the number of $$B$$s.

Here’s the final code in C++:

string shuffle (vector<int> permutation) {  int countA, countB;  int n = permutation.size();  for (int i = 0; i < n; i += 2) {    if (permuation[i] <= (n / 2))      ++countA;    else      ++countB;  }  if ((n / 2) % 2) {    if (countA - 1 == countB)      return "Possible";    else      return "Impossible";  } else {    if (countA == countB)      return "Possible";    else      return "Impossible";  }}

## Wednesday, October 8, 2014

### Problem discussion: Timus OJ 1225 Flags

This was one of the interesting problems I solved last week. I was just checking out Timus OJ when I stumbled across it. Here is the abridged problem statement (read the original statement at Timus OJ):
Given $$n$$, the number of stripes, find the number of distinct ways the stripes can be colored if the only colors that can be used are white, blue and red. These constraints should be satisfied:
• No two consecutive stripes should be of the same color
• A blue stripe must always be between a red and a white one or a white and a red one.
If you want to try to come up with a solution yourself first, now is a good time. I am going to explain my solution in the next paragraph. If you want to submit your solution you need to register at http://acm.timus.ru.

The first thing to notice is that the last stripe cannot be blue since a blue stripe can appear only between a red and a white stripe. So, the solution to the problem is $\text{number of ways in which red is last + number of ways in which white is last}$ But how do we find those quantities?

If the last stripe is red, the stripe before it has to be either white or blue. Suppose we have a number of arrangements in which the second stripe from the last is white. All these arrangements contribute to the number of arrangements with last stripe red because we can color the last stripe red in all such arrangements. But, this is not the only way we can get arrangements with the last stripe red because we haven’t yet considered the case in which the second to last stripe is blue.

Now, suppose that the second to last stripe is blue. The stripe that comes before this can be either red or white. If that stripe is red then the last stripe cannot be red so we ignore that case. So, all arrangements in which the third stripe from the last is white can have the last stripe red if we add a blue and a red stripe (in that order). Observe that there are no more ways of getting the last stripe as red other than the two discussed (convince yourself of this).

Similar arguments can be made for finding the number of ways in which the last stripe is white. It is clear that we have managed to come up with a recursive solution to the problem. Let’s state the recurrence relation in a bit more formally.
Let $$f(i, c)$$ be the number of ways of coloring the stripes $$1,\, 2,\, ...\, ,\,i$$ such that the $$i^{th}$$ stripe has the color $$c$$.
$$$f(i, c) = \begin{cases} f(i - 1, red) + f(i - 1, white) & \text{if } c = blue, \\ f(i - 1, white) + f(i - 2, white) & \text{if } c = red, \\ f(i - 1, red) + f(i - 2, red) & \text{if } c = white. \end{cases}$$$ So, the final answer will be $$$answer = f(n, red) + f(n, white)$$$ where $$n$$ is the total number of stripes.
The next step is to observe that this recursive solution has overlapping sub-problems. If it is not obvious, you can convince yourself of this by drawing a recursion tree. So, we need to use dynamic programming to speed up our solution. We have $$3N$$ dp states (why?) and hence the time complexity is $$\mathcal{O}(3N) = \mathcal{O}(N)$$.

As always I will leave the implementation to you. But, if you are stuck you can have a look at my solution.

Have a nice day!

## Saturday, September 27, 2014

### Introduction to Disjoint-set data structure through UVa 10583 – Ubiquitous Religions

Its been quite a while since I last wrote and I feel terrible about it. So, I have decided that, starting from today, I will try to publish at least one post every week. Through these weekly posts, I will discuss the most interesting algorithmic problem I solved during the week. Some of them, like this one, will be accompanied with an introduction to a new data structure or algorithm I had to learn to solve the problem. Now, lets start disjoint-set data structure without further ado.

Lets first analyze the problem and understand why we need disjoint-set data structure. Here is an abridged version of the problem statement (link to original problem statement):
There are n $$(1 \leq n \leq 50000 )$$ students in a university and for some given m $$( 0 \leq m \leq \frac{n(n - 1)}{2} )$$ pairs of students you know that the students in each pair follow the same religion. Find the maximum number of religions that the students in the university believe in assuming that one student can follow exactly one religion.
After reading the statement, we can make the following observations:
• If a and b follow the same religion and b and c follow the same religion, then a and c follow the same religion
• All the n students of the university can be divided into different sets such that all students in the same set follow the same religion. Initially (i.e. before scanning the input), each student is in a different set.
• For a pair $$(a, b)$$ in the input we need to find sets $$A$$ and $$B$$ such that $$a \in A$$ and $$b \in B$$ and combine them i.e. we have to find $$C = A \cup B$$ and replace both $$A$$ and $$B$$ with $$C$$. (Note that since a student cannot follow more than one religion, the sets $$A$$ and $$B$$ are either equal or disjoint.)
So, we need a need a data structure that can, given $$a$$ and $$b$$, find sets $$A, B$$ such that $$a \in A$$ and $$b \in B$$ and then find $$C = A \cup B$$ efficiently. This is where disjoint-set data structure comes in.
A disjoint-set data structure, also called a union-find set or merge-find set, is a data structure that keeps track of a set of elements partitioned into a number of disjoint sets.
The most efficient implementation is using rooted trees and a couple of heuristic and that’s the only implementation I am going to discuss here although I urge you to explore the linked list implementation and understand why it is slow. Each set in the disjoint-set forest is represented by a tree in which each node points to its parent and the root of each tree is called the representative of the set. A representative of a set is an element of the set that is used as an identifier for the set i.e every set can be identified by its representative. This data structure should be able to perform these operations efficiently:
• make-set(x) : creates a new set with $$x$$ as its only member
• find(a) : finds the set that contains $$a$$ i.e returns the representative of the set that contains $$a$$
• union(a, b) : merges (union) the sets containing a and b i.e it computes $$A \cup B$$ where $$a \in B$$ and $$b \in B$$. This is achieved by finding the representative of $$a$$ and $$b$$ and then making one of them the parent of the other.
Assuming that you explored the linked list implementation, you will notice that this is not faster than that in the worst case. To make it faster we need to use two heuristics: union by rank and path compression.

Union by rank In the union() operation above there are no specific instructions on which set should be the parent. It is shown that optimal performance is achieved when the set with the higher rank is made the parent. Rank can be defined as an upper bound on the number of edges between in the longest path between the root and a leaf.

Path compression During the find() operation, we travel from a given node to the root of the tree. During this traversal we can set the parent for each node in the path to be the representative element thereby reducing the height of the tree and making the subsequent find() operations faster. Note that the application of this heuristic does not change the rank because the rank is just an upper bound (which is useful for proving time complexity).

It’s now time to implement this data structure. Here’s the pseudo code:
 Let parent[1 ... n] and rank[1 ... n] be arrays such that
parent[x] stores the parent of node x and,
rank[x] stores the rank of node x.

PROCEDURE make-set(x):
1.    parent[x] := x
2.    rank[x] := 0

PROCEDURE find(x):
1.    if (parent[x] != x) // path compression
2.       parent[x] := find(parent[x])
3.    return parent[x]

PROCEDURE union(x, y):
1.    xRoot := find(x) // find the set containing x
2.    yRoot := find(y) // find the set containing y
3.    if (xRoot == yRoot)
4.        return
5.
6.    // use union by rank heuristic to merge
7.    if (rank[xRoot] < rank[yRoot])
8.        parent[xRoot] := yRoot
9.    else if rank[xRoot] > rank[yRoot]
10.        parent[yRoot] := xRoot
11.    else
12.        parent[yRoot] := xRoot
13.        rank[xRoot] := rank[xRoot] + 1

It can be proved that the time complexity for union and find operations is $$\mathcal{O}(\alpha(n))$$ where $$\alpha(n)$$ is the very slowly growing inverse Ackermann function. The value of $$\alpha(n)$$ is less than 5 for all practical values of $$n$$.

Now that we know how the data structure works and how to implement it, solving the problem is straightforward. But, there’s a problem. The problem requires us to calculate the number of disjoint sets that have formed. To do this we just need to use a variable to keep track of the number of sets. Whenever make-set() is called, the variable has to be incremented by 1 and whenever union() is called the variable is decremented by 1 (Why?). Take it as a challenge to add this feature to your implementation. Here’s the algorithm (without the set counter) to solve the problem:
 PROCEDURE Ubiquitous-Religions():
1.    // add each student to an individual set
2.    for i = 1 to n:
3.        make-set(i) // add set {i} to the forest
4.
5.    // process each of the m pairs
6.    for each pair (a, b):
7.        union(a, b) // a & b follow the same religion
8.
9.    // the answer is the number of disjoint sets
11.
12.    return answer

As always, I will leave out the implementation specific details and encourage you to implement the data structure and the above algorithm yourself instead of copying someone’s code off the internet. If you don’t know where or how to start you can have a look at my solution to the problem (in Java). Also, if you want to submit your solution at UVa Online Judge be mindful of the input and output specifications.

You can find more problems related to disjoint sets at UVa Online Judge.

Have a nice day!

## Wednesday, April 2, 2014

### DotA 2 offline with bots (without Steam)

It is very strange and annoying that to play DotA 2 you have to log in to Steam and be connected to the internet. But this might not always be possible. In my case, I use my college internet and the ports required for Steam are blocked. So, I can’t use Steam (except for when I am at home). And since I can’t use Steam, I can’t download and play DotA 2 the usual way. So, in this post I am going to describe what I did to make DotA 2 start without Steam.

First of all, I asked my friend to give me a copy of his SteamApps folder. After I got it, I copied the folder into my computer and navigated to the DotA 2 directory and started dota.exe. After a few seconds the intro video (that bald guy) showed up followed by the loading screen. Then, suddenly, the loading stopped and a message appeared on the screen: “Steam missing or out of date”.

Now, to play offline with bots, the first thing you need to do is to cause the console to open whenever the game starts up. Once you get the console, you can use some commands to start an offline game. To cause the console to show at game startup you can execute dota.exe with the command line argument -console. You can do this through a command prompt or by creating a shortcut. In this article, I will use the command-line approach. Type this command into the Windows command prompt.

dota.exe -console -novid

The argument -novid is just stop the intro video from appearing. The loading screen will directly appear. Now, you should see the loading screen. After a few seconds, you will get a black screen with nothing but the console displayed. Now that you have the console, type the following commands one after the other.

sv_lan 1sv_cheats 1dota_start_ai_game 1dota_bot_set_difficulty 1map dota

After the last command the game will load and you will be taken to the all pick screen. Just pick your favorite hero and start playing!

NOTE: This works even if you start Steam in offline mode. But, if you don’t have Steam, please make sure you are not connected to the internet before doing this. For some reason it doesn’t work if you are connected to the internet. Weird things start happening like: your hero not moving, all bots spawning on radiant side etc.