Posts tagged ‘Algorithms’

Efficient multiple totient calculation in C#

For a certain problem in Project Euler, I needed a function to calculate the Totient of all numbers in [2..10^7]. Going over them one at a time and factorizing them would take too long, so I used a variant of the prime sieve to speed up the calculation. The code is not overly documented, but it should be relatively easy to grok once you understand how to calculate the Totient of a single number.

The time complexity is O(n log n).

/// <summary>
/// Return an array of all totients in [0..n-1]
/// </summary>
/// <param name="n"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static long[] CalcTotients(long n)
{
    long[] divisors = GetDivisors(n);
    long i;
    var phi = new long[n];
    phi[1] = 1;
    for (i = 1; i < n; ++i)
        CalcTotient(i, phi, divisors);
 
    return phi;
}
 
/// <summary>
/// For every integer, the result will contain its lowest divisor.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="n"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
private static long[] GetDivisors(long n)
{
    var divisors = new long[n];
    divisors[1] = 1;
    long i;
    for (i = 2; i < n; ++i)
    {
        if (divisors[i] != 0)
            continue;
 
        for (long j = i; j < n; j += i)
            divisors[j] = i;
    }
    return divisors;
}
 
private static long CalcTotient(long i, long[] phi, long[] divisors)
{
    if (phi[i] != 0)
        return phi[i];
 
    long div = divisors[i];
    if (div == i)
    {
        phi[i] = i - 1;
        return phi[i];
    }
 
    long lower = 1;
    int exp = 0;
    while ((i > 1) && (i % div == 0))
    {
        i /= div;
        lower *= div;
        exp++;
    }
    if (i == 1)
    {
        phi[lower] = ((long)Math.Pow(div, exp - 1)) * (div-1);
        return phi[lower];
    }
    phi[i*lower] = CalcTotient(i, phi, divisors) *
                         CalcTotient(lower, phi, divisors);
    return phi[i*lower];
}

Reached level 2 on Project Euler

And got me this nice cube as a reward.

.

Problems are starting to get more interesting, but not quite there yet. Still, brute force or nearly brute force solves a lot of problems. I’m somewhat surprised that I didn’t have to implement a decent primality test yet.

Cool problems to look at are 79 and 31 (hint: think of problem 18).

Reached level 1 in Project Euler

This is a horrible waste of time, don’t dare check out Project Euler (thanks Eli).

I just reached Level 1 after solving my first 25 problems. Still haven’t reached a problem that requires much thinking, even though Problem 17 was annoying (Eli had to think in order to solve Problem 12 in Python, for me the brute-force approach in C# just worked).

How sorting works

A very cool visual demonstration how various sorting algorithms work on different inputs.

Some xkcd

http://xkcd.com/341/
http://xkcd.com/342/

What’s amusing, beyond the Kill Bill 2 analogy, is that “hacking” and “algorithm complexity” are almost orthogonal concepts. An 1337 hacker doesn’t necessarily knows his algorithms, and of course algorithm designer (אלגוריתמיקאי?) is usually a lousy hacker if anything.

IMHO.