Develop Reference

How to calculate the probability of getting the sum X using N six-sided dice

The Challenge:
For example, what is the probability of getting the sum of 15 when using 3 six-sided dice. This can be for example by getting 5-5-5 or 6-6-3 or 3-6-6 or many more options.
A brute force solution for 2 dice - with complexity of 6^2:
Assuming we had only 2 six-sided dice, we can write a very basic code like that:
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(whatAreTheOdds(7));
}
public static double whatAreTheOdds(int wantedSum){
if (wantedSum < 2 || wantedSum > 12){
return 0;
}
int wantedFound = 0;
int totalOptions = 36;
for (int i = 1; i <= 6; i++) {
for (int j = 1; j <= 6; j++) {
int sum = i+j;
if (sum == wantedSum){
System.out.println("match: " + i + " " + j );
wantedFound +=1;
}
}
}
System.out.println("combinations count:" + wantedFound);
return (double)wantedFound / totalOptions;
}
And the output for 7 will be:
match: 1 6
match: 2 5
match: 3 4
match: 4 3
match: 5 2
match: 6 1
combination count:6
0.16666666666666666
The question is how to generalize the algorithm to support N dice:
public static double whatAreTheOdds(int wantedSum, int numberOfDices)
Because we can't dynamically create nested for loops, we must come with a different approach.
I thought of something like that:
public static double whatAreTheOdds(int sum, int numberOfDices){
int sum;
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfDices; i++) {
for (int j = 1; j <= 6; j++) {
}
}
}
but failed to come up with the right algorithm.
Another challenge here is - is there a way to do it efficiently, and not in a complexity of 6^N?

Here is a recursive solution with memoization to count the combinations.
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.lang.Math;
class Dices {
public static final int DICE_FACES = 6;
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(whatAreTheOdds(40, 10));
}
public static double whatAreTheOdds(int sum, int dices) {
if (dices < 1 || sum < dices || sum > DICE_FACES * dices) return 0;
long[][] mem = new long[dices][sum];
for (long[] mi : mem) {
Arrays.fill(mi, 0L);
}
long n = whatAreTheOddsRec(sum, dices, mem);
return n / Math.pow(DICE_FACES, dices);
}
private static long whatAreTheOddsRec(int sum, int dices, long[][] mem) {
if (dices <= 1) {
return 1;
}
long n = 0;
int dicesRem = dices - 1;
int minFace = Math.max(sum - DICE_FACES * dicesRem, 1);
int maxFace = Math.min(sum - dicesRem, DICE_FACES);
for (int i = minFace; i <= maxFace; i++) {
int sumRem = sum - i;
long ni = mem[dicesRem][sumRem];
if (ni <= 0) {
ni = whatAreTheOddsRec(sumRem, dicesRem, mem);
mem[dicesRem][sumRem] = ni;
}
n += ni;
}
return n;
}
}
Output:
0.048464367913724195
EDIT: For the record, the complexity of this algorithm is still O(6^n), this answer just aims to give a possible implementation for the general case that is better than the simplest implementation, using memoization and search space prunning (exploring only feasible solutions).

As Alex's answer notes, there is a combinatorial formula for this:
In this formula, p is the sum of the numbers rolled (X in your question), n is the number of dice, and s is the number of sides each dice has (6 in your question). Whether the binomial coefficients are evaluated using loops, or precomputed using Pascal's triangle, either way the time complexity is O(n2) if we take s = 6 to be a constant and X - n to be O(n).
Here is an alternative algorithm, which computes all of the probabilities at once. The idea is to use discrete convolution to compute the distribution of the sum of two random variables given their distributions. By using a divide and conquer approach as in the exponentiation by squaring algorithm, we only have to do O(log n) convolutions.
The pseudocode is below; sum_distribution(v, n) returns an array where the value at index X - n is the number of combinations where the sum of n dice rolls is X.
// for exact results using integers, let v = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]
// and divide the result through by 6^n afterwards
let v = [1/6.0, 1/6.0, 1/6.0, 1/6.0, 1/6.0, 1/6.0]
sum_distribution(distribution, n)
if n == 0
return [1]
else if n == 1
return v
else
let r = convolve(distribution, distribution)
// the division here rounds down
let d = sum_distribution(r, n / 2)
if n is even
return d
else
return convolve(d, v)
Convolution cannot be done in linear time, so the running time is dominated by the last convolution on two arrays of length 3n, since the other convolutions are on sufficiently shorter arrays.
This means if you use a simple convolution algorithm, it should take O(n2) time to compute all of the probabilities, and if you use a fast Fourier transform then it should take O(n log n) time.

You might want to take a look at Wolfram article for a completely different approach, which calculates the desired probability with a single loop.

The idea is to have an array storing the current "state" of each dice, starting will every dice at one, and count upwards. For example, with three dice you would generate the combinations:
111
112
...
116
121
122
...
126
...
665
666
Once you have a state, you can easily find if the sum is the one you are looking for.
I leave the details to you, as it seems a useful learning exercise :)

Time Complexity of permutation function

Given a collection of distinct numbers, return all possible permutations.
For example, [1,2,3] have the following permutations:
[ [1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2,1,3], [2,3,1], [3,1,2], [3,2,1] ]
My Iterative Solution is :
public List<List<Integer>> permute(int[] nums) {
List<List<Integer>> result = new ArrayList<>();
result.add(new ArrayList<>());
for(int i=0;i<nums.length;i++)
{
List<List<Integer>> temp = new ArrayList<>();
for(List<Integer> a: result)
{
for(int j=0; j<=a.size();j++)
{
a.add(j,nums[i]);
List<Integer> current = new ArrayList<>(a);
temp.add(current);
a.remove(j);
}
}
result = new ArrayList<>(temp);
}
return result;
}
My Recursive Solution is:
public List<List<Integer>> permuteRec(int[] nums) {
List<List<Integer>> result = new ArrayList<List<Integer>>();
if (nums == null || nums.length == 0) {
return result;
}
makePermutations(nums, result, 0);
return result;
}
void makePermutations(int[] nums, List<List<Integer>> result, int start) {
if (start >= nums.length) {
List<Integer> temp = convertArrayToList(nums);
result.add(temp);
}
for (int i = start; i < nums.length; i++) {
swap(nums, start, i);
makePermutations(nums, result, start + 1);
swap(nums, start, i);
}
}
private ArrayList<Integer> convertArrayToList(int[] num) {
ArrayList<Integer> item = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for (int h = 0; h < num.length; h++) {
item.add(num[h]);
}
return item;
}
According to me the time complexity(big-Oh) of my iterative solution is: n * n(n+1)/2~ O(n^3)
I am not able to figure out the time complexity of my recursive solution.
Can anyone explain complexity of both?

The recursive solution has a complexity of O(n!) as it is governed by the equation: T(n) = n * T(n-1) + O(1).
The iterative solution has three nested loops and hence has a complexity of O(n^3).
However, the iterative solution will not produce correct permutations for any number apart from 3.
For n = 3, you can see that n * (n - 1) * (n-2) = n!. The LHS is O(n^3) (or rather O(n^n) since n=3 here) and the RHS is O(n!).
For larger values of the size of the list, say n, you could have n nested loops and that will provide valid permutations. The complexity in that case will be O(n^n), and that is much larger than O(n!), or rather, n! < n^n. There is a rather nice relation called Stirling's approximation which explains this relation.

It's the output (which is huge) matters in this problem, not the routine's implementation. For n distinct items, there are n! permutations to be returned as the answer, and thus we have at least O(n!) complexity.
With a help of Stirling's approximation
O(n!) = O(n^(1/2+n)/exp(n)) = O(sqrt(n) * (n/e)^n)
we can easily see, that O(n!) > O(n^c) for any constant c, that's why it doesn't matter if the implementation itself adds another O(n^3) since
O(n!) + O(n^3) = O(n!)

In terms of number of times the method makePermutations is called, the exact time complexity would be:
O( 1 + n + n(n-1) + n(n-1)(n-2) + ... )
For n = 3:
O( 1 + 3 + (3*2) + (3*2*1) ) = O(16)
This means, for n = 3, the method makePermutations will be called 16 times.

And I think the space complexity for an optimal permutations function would be O(n * n!) because there are n! total arrays to return, and each of those arrays is of size n.

collatz sequence - optimising code

As an additional question to an assignment, we were asked to find the 10 starting numbers (n) that produce the longest collatz sequence. (Where 0 < n < 10,000,000,000) I wrote code that would hopefully accomplish this, but I estimate that it would take a full 11 hours to compute an answer.
I have noticed a couple of small optimisations like starting from biggest to smallest so adding to the array is done less, and only computing between 10,000,000,000/2^10 (=9765625) and 10,000,000,000 because there has to be 10 sequences of longer length, but I can't see anything more I could do. Can anyone help?
Relevant Code
The Sequence Searching Alg
long[][] longest = new long[2][10]; //terms/starting number
long max = 10000000000l; //10 billion
for(long i = max; i >= 9765625; i--) {
long n = i;
long count = 1; //terms in the sequence
while(n > 1) {
if((n & 1) == 0) n /= 2; //checks if the last bit is a 0
else {
n = (3*n + 1)/2;
count++;
}
count++;
}
if(count > longest[0][9]) {
longest = addToArray(count, i, longest);
currentBest(longest); //prints the currently stored top 10
}
}
The storage alg
public static long[][] addToArray(long count, long i, long[][] longest) {
int pos = 0;
while(count < longest[0][pos]) {
pos++;
}
long TEMP = count; //terms
long TEMPb = i; //starting number
for(int a = pos; a < longest[0].length; a++) {
long TEMP2 = longest[0][a];
longest[0][a] = TEMP;
TEMP = TEMP2;
long TEMP2b = longest[1][a];
longest[1][a] = TEMPb;
TEMPb = TEMP2b;
}
return longest;
}

You can do something like
while (true) {
int ntz = Long.numberOfTrailingZeros(n);
count += ntz;
n >>>= ntz; // Using unsigned shift allows to work with bigger numbers.
if (n==1) break;
n = 3*n + 1;
count++;
}
which should be faster as it does multiple steps at once and avoids unpredictable branches. numberOfTrailingZeros is JVM intrinsic taking just one cycle on modern desktop CPUs. However, it's not very efficient as the average number of zeros is only 2.
The Wikipedia explains how to do multiple steps at once. This is based on the observation that knowing k least significant bits is sufficient to determine the future steps up to the point when the k-th halving happens. My best result based on this (with k=17) and filtering out some non-promising values is 57 seconds for the determination of the maximum in range 1 .. 1e10.

violating the given average time complexity in Big-O notation

I am trying to Implement a solutions to find k-th largest element in a given integer list with duplicates with O(N*log(N)) average time complexity in Big-O notation, where N is the number of elements in the list.
As per my understanding Merge-sort has an average time complexity of O(N*log(N)) however in my below code I am actually using an extra for loop along with mergesort algorithm to delete duplicates which is definitely violating my rule of find k-th largest element with O(N*log(N)). How do I go about it by achieving my task O(N*log(N)) average time complexity in Big-O notation?
public class FindLargest {
public static void nthLargeNumber(int[] arr, String nthElement) {
mergeSort_srt(arr, 0, arr.length - 1);
// remove duplicate elements logic
int b = 0;
for (int i = 1; i < arr.length; i++) {
if (arr[b] != arr[i]) {
b++;
arr[b] = arr[i];
}
}
int bbb = Integer.parseInt(nthElement) - 1;
// printing second highest number among given list
System.out.println("Second highest number is::" + arr[b - bbb]);
}
public static void mergeSort_srt(int array[], int lo, int n) {
int low = lo;
int high = n;
if (low >= high) {
return;
}
int middle = (low + high) / 2;
mergeSort_srt(array, low, middle);
mergeSort_srt(array, middle + 1, high);
int end_low = middle;
int start_high = middle + 1;
while ((lo <= end_low) && (start_high <= high)) {
if (array[low] < array[start_high]) {
low++;
} else {
int Temp = array[start_high];
for (int k = start_high - 1; k >= low; k--) {
array[k + 1] = array[k];
}
array[low] = Temp;
low++;
end_low++;
start_high++;
}
}
}
public static void main(String... str) {
String nthElement = "2";
int[] intArray = { 1, 9, 5, 7, 2, 5 };
FindLargest.nthLargeNumber(intArray, nthElement);
}
}

Your only problem here is that you don't understand how to do the time analysis. If you have one routine which takes O(n) and one which takes O(n*log(n)), running both takes a total of O(n*log(n)). Thus your code runs in O(n*log(n)) like you want.
To do things formally, we would note that the definition of O() is as follows:
f(x) ∈ O(g(x)) if and only if there exists values c > 0 and y such that f(x) < cg(x) whenever x > y.
Your merge sort is in O(n*log(n)) which tells us that its running time is bounded above by c1*n*log(n) when n > y1 for some c1,y1. Your duplication elimination is in O(n) which tells us that its running time is bounded above by c2*n when n > y2 for some c2 and y2. Using this, we can know that the total running time of the two is bounded above by c1*n*log(n)+c2*n when n > max(y1,y2). We know that c1*n*log(n)+c2*n < c1*n*log(n)+c2*n*log(n) because log(n) > 1, and this, of course simplifies to (c1+c2)*n*log(n). Thus, we can know that the running time of the two together is bounded above by (c1+c2)*n*log(n) when n > max(y1,y2) and thus, using c1+c2 as our c and max(y1,y2) as our y, we know that the running time of the two together is in O(n*log(n)).
Informally, you can just know that faster growing functions always dominate, so if one piece of code is O(n) and the second is O(n^2), the combination is O(n^2). If one is O(log(n)) and the second is O(n), the combination is O(n). If one is O(n^20) and the second is O(n^19.99), the combination is O(n^20). If one is O(n^2000) and the second is O(2^n), the combination is O(2^n).

Problem here is your merge routine where you have used another loop which i donot understand why, Hence i would say your algorithm of merge O(n^2) which changes your merge sort time to O(n^2).
Here is a pseudo code for typical O(N) merge routine :-
void merge(int low,int high,int arr[]) {
int buff[high-low+1];
int i = low;
int mid = (low+high)/2;
int j = mid +1;
int k = 0;
while(i<=mid && j<=high) {
if(arr[i]<arr[j]) {
buff[k++] = arr[i];
i++;
}
else {
buff[k++] = arr[j];
j++;
}
}
while(i<=mid) {
buff[k++] = arr[i];
i++;
}
while(j<=high) {
buff[k++] = arr[j];
j++;
}
for(int x=0;x<k;x++) {
arr[low+x] = buff[x];
}
}

Calculating runtime in recursive algorithm

Practicing recursion and D&C and a frequent problem seems to be to convert the array:
[a1,a2,a3..an,b1,b2,b3...bn] to [a1,b1,a2,b2,a3,b3...an,bn]
I solved it as follows (startA is the start of as and startB is the start of bs:
private static void shuffle(int[] a, int startA, int startB){
if(startA == startB)return;
int tmp = a[startB];
shift(a, startA + 1, startB);
a[startA + 1] = tmp;
shuffle(a, startA + 2, startB + 1);
}
private static void shift(int[] a, int start, int end) {
if(start >= end)return;
for(int i = end; i > start; i--){
a[i] = a[i - 1];
}
}
But I am not sure what the runtime is. Isn't it linear?

Let the time consumed by the algorithm be T(n), and let n=startB-startA.
Each recursive invokation reduces the run time by 1 (startB-startA is reduced by one per invokation), so the run time is T(n) = T(n-1) + f(n), we only need to figure what f(n) is.
The bottle neck in each invokation is the shift() operation, which is iterating from startA+1 to startB, meaning n-1 iterations.
Thus, the complexity of the algorithm is T(n) = T(n-1) + (n-1).
However, this is a known Theta(n^2) function (sum of arithmetic progression) - and the time complexity of the algorithm is Theta(N^2), since the initial startB-startA is linear with N (the size of the input).