## Sunday, March 06, 2016

### Solutions to Facebook Hacker Cup 2016

Since the official solutions aren't out yet, here are my solutions. Although I scored 0 in the contest, four of my solutions were basically correct, one I was able to solve fairly easily after another contestant pointed out that my approach was wrong, and I figured out Grundy Graphs on the way home.

### Snake and Ladder

I'll describe two solutions to this. There are a few things one can start off with. Firstly, if there are rows at the top or bottom that are completely full of flowers, just cut them off — they make no difference. Then, handle N=1 specially: if K=1, the answer is 1, if K=0, it is 2. A number of people (including all the contest organisers!) messed up the first, and I messed up the second. Also, if one rung has two flowers on it, the answer is 0.

My contest solution used dynamic programming. If one cuts the ladder half-way between two rungs and considers the state of the bottom half, it can be divided into four cases:
1. Only the left-hand side has the snake on it.
2. Only the right-hand side has the snake on it.
3. Both sides have the snake on it, and the two are connected somewhere below.
4. Both sides have the snake on it, and the two do not connect.
It is reasonably straightforward (as long as one is careful) to determine the dynamic programming transitions to add a rung, for each possibility of a flower on the left, on the right, or no flower. Advancing one rung at a time will be too slow for the bound on N, but the transitions can be expressed as 4×4 matrices and large gaps between flowers can be crossed with fast matrix exponentiation. Finally, one must double the answer to account for the choice of which end is the head.

The alternative solution is to argue on a case-by-case basis. If there no flowers, then one can pick a row for the head and a row for the tail, and pick a column for the head (the column for the tail is then forced by parity). Once these choices are made, there is only one way to complete the snake. Also, the head and tail can only occupy the same row if it is the top or bottom row, giving 2N(N-1)+4 ways.

If there is at least one flower, then the head must be above the top flower and the tail below the bottom flower (or vice versa). Again, one can choose a row for each, with the column being forced by parity. One must also consider special cases for a flower in the top/bottom row.

### Boomerang Crew

I think this was possibly the easiest of the problems, provided you thought clearly about it (which I failed to do). Clearly any opponents weaker than (or equal to) your champion can be defeated just be putting them up against your champion. Also, if you're going to defeat P players, they might as well be the weakest P players of the opposition. For a given P, can this be done? There will be a certain number of strong players (stronger than our champion), which we will have to sacrifice our weaker players against to wear them down. What's more, once we've worn one down and beaten him/her, we have to use the winner of that game to wear down the next strong opponent. Thus, we should match up the S strong players against our best S players in some order, and use our remaining players as sacrifices. Ideally we'd like to wear down each opponent to exactly the skill level of the player we will use to win; anything more is wasted effort. We can apply this idea greedily: for each opponent, find the remaining strong player of ours who can win by the smallest margin.

With that method to test a particular P, it is a standard binary search to determine the number of players we can beat.

### Grundy Graph

I think this was the hardest problem: my submission wasn't a real solution and was just for a laugh; several other people I spoke to had submitted but didn't believe in their solution. During the contest I suspected that the solution would be related to 2-SAT, but it wasn't until the flight home that I could figure out how to incorporate turn ordering.

Let us construct an auxiliary directed graph A whose vertices correspond to those of the original. An edge u->v in A means that if u is black, then v must be black as well for Alice to win. All the edges in the original graph are clearly present in A. However, for each u->v in the original, we also add v'->u', where x' is the vertex assigned a colour at the same time as x. This is because if v' is black but u' is white, then it implies that u is black and v is white. This is the same as the contrapositive edge in a 2-SAT graph. Let x=>y indicate that y is reachable from x in A.

There are a number of situations in which we can see that Bob can win:
• If any strongly connected component contains both x and x', then Bob wins regardless of what Alice and Bob play.
• If Bob controls vertices x and y and x=>y, then Bob wins by assigning x black and y white, regardless of Alice's play.
• If Bob controls x, Alice controls y, x=>y, x' => y', and y is played before x, then Bob wins by assigning y the opposite colour to x.
We claim that if none of the above apply, then Alice wins. Her strategy is that on her turn, she must colour x black if there is any u such that u => x and either u has already been coloured black, u could later be coloured black by Bob, or u = x'. This ensures that it does not immediately allow Bob to win, nor allows Bob to use it to win later. The only way this could fail is if both x and x' are forced to be black (if neither is forced, Alice can pick freely).

Suppose u => x and v => x', where u and v are as described above. Then x => v', so u => v'. Firstly consider u = x'. We cannot have v = x (because otherwise x, x' are in the same SCC). Now x' => v', so v => v'. If Bob controls v, then we hit the second case above; if Alice controls v, then v => v' means she would never have chosen v. So we have a contradiction. Now, if u ≠ x' (and by symmetry, v ≠ x), then consider u => v' again. Alice cannot control v/v', since she would then have chosen v' rather than v. But similarly, v => u', so Alice couldn't have chosen u. It follows that Bob controls u and v, which can only be possible if u = v'. But u and u' can only both be relevant if Bob hasn't decided their colour yet, which is the third case above.

The implementation details are largely left as an exercise. Hint: construct the SCCs of A, and the corresponding DAG of the SCCs, then walk it in topological order to check the conditions. The whole thing takes linear time.

### RNG

The concept here is a reasonably straightforward exponential DP, but needs a careful implementation to get all the formulae right, particularly in the face of potential numeric instability. The graph itself isn't particularly relevant; the only "interesting" vertices are the start and the gifts, and the only useful information is the distance from each interesting vertex to each other one (if reachable) and the distance from each gift to the nearest dead-end. The DP state is the set of gifts collected and the current position (one of the interesting vertices). When one is at a gift, there are two possible options:
1. Pick another gift, and make towards it along the shortest path. Based on the path length L, there is a probability P^L of reaching it in time DL, and a probability 1 - P^L of respawning, with an expected time computable from a formula.
2. Aim to respawn by heading for the nearest dead-end. Again, one can work out a formula for the expected time to respawn.
When one is at the start, one should of course pick a gift and head for it. Again, one can compute an expected time to reach it (one obtains a formula that includes its own result, but a little algebra sorts that out).

### Maximinimax flow

I think I liked this problem the best, even though I screwed up the limits on the binary search. Firstly, what is the minimax flow? For a general graph it would be nasty to compute, but this graph has the same number of edges as vertices. This means that it has exactly one cycle with trees hanging off of it. It shouldn't be too hard to convince yourself that the minimax flow is the smaller of the smallest edge outside the cycle and the sum of the two smallest edges inside the cycle.

Veterans will immediately reach for a binary search, testing whether it is possible to raise the minimax flow to a given level. For the edges outside the ring, this is a somewhat standard problem that can be solved with query structures e.g. Fenwick trees, indexed by edge value. To raise the minimum to a given level, one needs to know the number of edges below that level (one Fenwick tree, storing a 1 for each edge), and their current sum (a second tree, storing the edge weight for each edge).

For the vertices inside the cycle it is only slightly more complex. If the required level is less than double the second-smallest edge, then one need only augment the smallest edge. Otherwise one raises all edges to half the target, with a bit of special-casing when the target is odd. The Fenwick tree can also be queried to find the two smallest edges, but I just added a std::multiset to look this up.

### Rainbow strings

This seemed to be one of the most-solved problems, and is possibly the easiest if you have a suffix tree/array routine in your toolbox. A right-to-left sweep will yield the shortest and longest possible substring for each starting position (next green for the shortest, next red for the longest). The trick is to process queries in order of length. Each entry in the suffix array will become usable at some length, and unusable again at another length, and these events, along with the queries, can be sorted by length for processing. The only remaining work is to determine the Kth of the active suffixes, which can be done with a Fenwick tree or other query structure.

Finally, one needs the frequency table for each prefix to be able to quickly count the frequency in each substring.

## Analysis of ICPC 2015 world finals problems

I haven't solved all the problems yet, but here are solutions to those I have solved (I've spent quite a bit more than 5 hours on it though).

### A: Amalgamated Artichokes

This is a trivial problem that basically everybody solved - I won't go into it.

### B: Asteroids

This looks quite nasty, but it can actually be solved by assembling a number of fairly standard computational geometry tools, and the example input was very helpful. To simplify things, let's switch to the frame of reference of the first asteroid, and assume only the second asteroid moves (call them P and Q for short). The first thing to notice is that the area is a piecewise quadratic function of time, with changes when a vertex of one polygon crosses an edge of the other. This is because the derivative of area depends on the sections of boundary of Q inside P, and those vary linearly in those intervals. Finding the boundaries between intervals is a standard line-line intersection problem. To distinguish between zero and "never", touching is considered to be an intersection too.
We also need a way to compute the area of the intersection. Clipping a convex polygon to a half-space is a standard problem too - vertices are classified as inside or outside, and edges that go from inside to outside or vice versa introduce a new interpolated vertex, so repeated clipping will give the intersection of convex polygons. And finding the area of a polygon is also very standard.
Finally, we need to handle the case where the best area occurs midway through one of the quadratic pieces. Rather than try to figure out the quadratic coefficients geometrically, I just sampled it at three points (start, middle, end) and solved for the coefficients, and hence the maximum, with algebra.

### C: Catering

I'm sure I'm seen something similar, but I'm not sure where. It can be set up as a min-cost max-flow problem. Split every site into two, an arrival area and a departure area. Connect the source to each departure area, with cap 1 for clients and cap K for the company. Connect each arrival area to the sink similarly. Connect every departure area to every later arrival area with cap 1, except for the company->company link with cap K. Edge costs match the table of costs where appropriate, zero elsewhere. The maximum flow is now K+N (K teams leave the company, and equipment arrives at and leaves every client), and the minimum cost is the cost of the operation.

### D: Cutting cheese

This is basically just a binary search for each cut position, plus some mathematics to give the volume of a sphere that has been cut by a plane.

### E: Parallel evolution

Start by sorting the strings by length. A simplistic view is that we need to go through these strings in order, assigning each to one path or the other. This can be done with fairly standard dynamic programming, but it will be far too slow.
Add an "edge" from each string to the following one if it is a subsequence of this following one. This will break the strings up into connected chains. A key observation is that when assigning the strings in a chain, it is never necessary to switch sides more than once: if two elements in a chain are on one path, one can always put all the intervening elements on the same path without invalidating a solution. Thus, one need only consider two cases for a chain: put all elements in one path (the opposite path to the last element of the previous chain), or start the chain on one path then switch to the other path part-way through. In the latter case, one should make the switch as early as possible (given previous chains), to make it easier to place subsequent strings. A useful feature is that in either case, we know the last element in both paths, which is all that matters for placing future chains. Dynamic programming takes care of deciding which option to use. Only a linear number of subsequence queries is required.
I really liked this problem, even though the implementation in messy. It depends only on the compatibility relationship being a partial order and there being a cheap way to find a topological sort.

### F: Keyboarding

This can be done with a fairly standard BFS. The graph has a state for each cursor position and number of completed letters. There are up to 5 edges from each state, corresponding to the 5 buttons. I precomputed where each arrow key moves to from each grid position, but I don't know if that is needed. It's also irrelevant that keys form connected regions.

### H: Qanat

This is a good one for a mathsy person to work out on paper while someone else is coding - the code itself is trivial. Firstly, the slope being less than one implies that dirt from the channel always goes out one of the two nearest shafts - whichever gets it to the surface quicker (it helps to think of there being a zero-height shaft at x=0). Between each pair of shafts, one can easily find the crossover point.
Consider just three consecutive shafts, and the cost to excavate them and the section of channel between them. If the outer shafts are fixed, the cost is a quadratic in the position of the middle shaft, from which one can derive a formula for its position in terms of its neighbours. This gives a relationship of the form xi+2 - gxi+1 + xi = 0. In theory, this can now be used to iteratively find the positions of all the shafts, up to a scale factor which is solved by the requirement for the final shaft (the mother well) to be at x=W.
I haven't tested it, but I think evaluating the recurrence could lead to catastrophic rounding problems, because errors introduced early on are exponentially scaled up, faster than the sequence itself grows. The alternative I used is to find a closed formula for the recurrence. This is a known result: let a and b be the roots of x2 - gx + 1 = 0; then the ith term is r(ai - bi) for the scale factor r. Finding the formula for g shows that the roots will always be real (and distinct) rather than complex.

### I: Ship traffic

This mostly needed some careful implementation. For each ship, there is an interval during which the ferry cannot launch. Sort the start and end times of all these intervals and sweeping through them, keeping track of how many ships will be hit for each interval between events. The longest such interval with zero collisions is the answer.

### J: Tile cutting

Firstly, which sizes can be cut, and in how many ways? If the lengths from the corners of the parallelograms to the corners of the tile are a, b, c, d, then the area is ab + cd. So the number of ways to make a size is the number of ways it can be written as ab + cd, for a, b, c, d > 0. The number of ways to write a number as ab can be computed by brute force (iterate over all values of a and b for which ab <= 500000). The number of ways to write a number as ab + cd is the convolution of this function with itself (ala polynomial multiplication). There are well-known algorithms to do this in O(N log N) time (with an FFT) or in O(N1.58) time (divide-and-conquer), and either is fast enough.

### K: Tours

I've got a solution that passes, but I don't think I can fully prove why.
I start by running a DFS to decompose the graph into a forest plus edges from a node to an ancestor in the forest. Each such "up" edge corresponds to a simple cycle. Clearly, the number of companies must divide into the length of any cycle, so we can take the GCD of these cycle lengths.
If the cycles were all disjoint, this would (I think) be sufficient, but overlapping cycles are a problem. Suppose two cycles overlap. That means there are two points A and B, with three independent paths between them, say X, Y, Z. If X has more than its share of routes from some company, then Y must have less than its share, to balance the tour X-Y. Similarly, Z must have less than its share. But then the tour Y-Z has too few routes from that company. It follows that X, Y and Z must all have equal numbers of routes from each company, and hence the number of companies must divide into each of their lengths.
And now for the bit I can't prove: it seems to be sufficient to consider only pairs of the simple cycles corresponding to using a single up edge. I just iterate over all pairs and compute the overlap. That is itself not completely trivial, requiring an acceleration structure to compute kth ancestors and least common ancestors.

### L: Weather report

This is an interesting variation of a classic result in compression theory, Hamming codes. The standard way to construct an optimal prefix-free code from a frequency table is to keep a priority queue of coding trees, and repeatedly combine the two least frequent items by giving them a common parent. That can't be done directly here because there are trillions of possible strings to code, but it can be done indirectly by noting that permutations have identical frequency, and storing them as a group rather than individual items. The actions of the original algorithm then need to be simulated, pairing up large numbers of identical items in a single operation.

## Sunday, October 26, 2014

### 2014 NEERC Southern Subregional

The ICPC NEERC South Subregional was mirrored on Codeforces. It was a very nice contest, with some approachable but also challenging problems. Here are my thoughts on the solutions (I solved everything except A, J and L during the contest).

### A: Nasta Rabbara

This is quite a nasty one, and my initial attempt during the contest was all wrong. The first thing to be aware of is that a single query can be answered in O(L log L) time (or less) using a modification on the standard union-find data structure: each edge in the union-find structure is labelled to indicate whether end-points have the same or the opposite parity, and the find operation tracks whether the returned root has the same or opposite parity as the query point. That way, edges that create cycles can be found to be either odd- or even-length cycles. Of course, this won't be fast enough if all the queries are large.

Ideally, one would like a data structure that allows both new edges to be added and existing edges to be removed. That would allow for a sliding-window approach, in which we identify the maximal left end-point for each right end-point. However, the 10 second time limit suggests that this is not the right approach.

Instead, there is a $$O(N+(M+Q)\sqrt{M}\log N)$$ solution. Dividing the series into blocks of length $$\sqrt{M}$$. For each block, identify all the queries with a right end-point inside the block. Now build up a union-find structure going right-to-left, starting from the left edge of the block. Whenever you hit the left end-point of one of the identified queries, add the remaining episodes for the query (which will all come from inside the block) to answer the query, then undo the effect of these extra episodes before continuing. As long as you don't do path compression, each union operation can be unwound in O(1) time. This will miss queries that occur entirely inside a block, but these can be answered by the algorithm from the first paragraph as they are short.

### B: Colored blankets

It turns out that it is always possible to find a solution. Firstly, blankets with no colour can be given an arbitrary colour on one side. It is fairly easy to see that we need only allocate blankets to kits such that each kit contains blankets of at most two colours. Repeat the following until completion:
1. If any colour has at most K/N blankets remaining and that colour has not been painted onto any kit, put those blankets into a new kit and paint it with that colour (this might involve zero blankets into that kit).
2. Otherwise, pick any colour that has not been painted on a kit. There must be a more than K/N blankets of that colour. Use enough of them to fill up any non-full painted kit. There must be such a kit, otherwise there are more than K blankets in total.
Since each kit is painted with a unique colour, this generates at most N kits; and since each kit has K/N blankets in it, it must generate exactly N kits.

### C: Component tree

The only difficulty with this problem is that the tree might be very deep, causing the naive algorithm to spend a lot of time walking up the tree. This can be solved with a heavy-light decomposition. On each heavy path, for each attribute that appears anywhere on the path, store a sorted list (by depth) of the nodes containing that attribute. When arriving on a heavy path during a walk, a binary search can tell where the nearest ancestor with that property occurs on the heavy path. I think this makes each query O(log N) time.

### D: Data center

This is a reasonably straightforward sliding window problem. Sort the servers of each type, and start with the minimum number of low voltage servers (obviously taking biggest first). One might also be required to take all the low voltage servers plus some high voltage servers. Then remove the low voltage servers one at a time (smallest first), and after each removal, add high voltage servers (largest first) until the capacity is made up. Then compare this combination to the best solution so far.

### E: Election

Firstly, ties can be treated as losses (both within a station and in the election), because we want the mayor to win. When merging two stations, there are two useful results that can occur: win+loss -> win, or loss+loss -> loss; in both cases the number of wins stays the same, while the number of losses goes down by one. So they are equally useful. We can determine the number of viable merges by DP: either the last two can be merged, and we solve for the other N-2; or the last one is untouched, and we solve for the other N-1.

### F: Ilya Muromets

Note that the gap closing up after a cut is just a distraction: any set of heads we can cut, can also be cut as two independent cuts of the original set of heads.

We can determine the best cut for every prefixes in linear time, by keeping a sliding window of sums (or using a prefix sum). Similarly, we can determine the best cut for every suffix. Any pair of cuts can be separated into a cut of a prefix and of the corresponding suffix, so we need only consider each split point in turn.

### G: FacePalm

Let's consider each k contiguous days in turn, going left to right. If the current sum is non-negative, we need to reduce some of the values. We might as well reduce the right-most value we can, since that will have the effect on as many future values as possible (past values have already been fixed to be negative, so that is not worth considering). So we reduce the last value as much as needed, or until it reaches the lower limit. If necessary, we then reduce the second-last value, and so on until the sum is negative.

The only catch is that we need a way to quickly skip over long sequences of the minimum value, to avoid quadratic running time. I kept a cache of previous non-minimum value (similar to path compression in union-find structures); a stack of the positions of non-minimum values should work too.

### H: Minimal Agapov code

The first triangle will clearly consist of the minimum three labels. This divides the polygon into (up to) three sections. Within each section, the next triangle will always stand on the existing diagonal, with the third vertex being the lowest label in the section. This will recursively subdivide the polygon into two more sections with one diagonal, and so on. One catch is that ties need to be broken carefully: pick the one furthest from the base with the smaller label (this lead to me getting a WA). Rather than considering all the tie-breaking cases for the first triangle, I started with a first diagonal with the two smallest labels, and found the first triangle through the recursion.

The main tool needed for this is an efficient range minimum query. There are a number of data structures for this, and any of them should work. I used two RMQ structures to cater for the two possible tie-breaking directions. The cyclic rather than linear nature of the queries, but it is just a matter of being careful.

### I: Sale in GameStore

This was the trivial problem: sort, get your friends to buy the most expensive item, start filling up on cheap items until you can't buy any more or you've bought everything.

### J: Getting Ready for the VIPC

I got a wrong answer to test case 53 on this, and I still don't know why. But I think my idea is sound.

The basic approach is dynamic programming, where one computes the minimum tiredness one can have after completing each contest, assuming it is possible to complete it (this also determines the resulting skill). To avoid some corner cases, I banned entering a contest with tiredness greater than $$h_i - l_i$$. However, this is $$O(N^2)$$, because for each contest, one must consider all possible previous contests.

The first optimisation one can do is that one can make a list of outcomes for each day, assuming one enters a contest that day: a list of (result skill, tiredness), one for each contest. If one contest results in both less skill and more tiredness than another, it can be pruned, so that one ends up with a list that increases in both skill and tiredness. Now one can compute the DP for a contest by considering only each previous day, and finding the minimum element in the list for which the skill in great enough to enter the current contest. The search can be done by binary search, so if there are few distinct days with lots of contests each day, this will be efficient; but if every contest is on a different day, we're no better off.

The second optimisation is to note the interesting decay function for tiredness. After about 20 days of inactivity, tireness is guaranteed to reach 0. Thus, there is no need to look more than this distance into the past: beyond 20 days, we only care about the maximum skill that can be reached on that day, regardless of how tired one is. This reduces the cost to $$O(N\log N\log maxT$$.

### K: Treeland

Pick any vertex and take its nearest neighbour: this is guaranteed to be an edge; call the end-points A and B. An edge in a tree partitions the rest of the tree into two parts. For any vertex C, either d(A, C) < d(B, C) or vice versa, and this tells us which partition C belongs to. We can thus compute the partition, and then recursively solve the problem within each partition.

### L: Useful roads

I didn't solve this during the contest, and I don't know exactly how to solve it yet.

### M: Variable shadowing

This is another reasonably straightforward implementation problem. For each variable I keep a stack of declarations, with each declaration tagged with the source position and a "scope id" (each new left brace creates a new scope id). I also keep a stack of open scope ids. When a right brace arrives, I check the top-of-stack for each variable to see if it matches the just closed scope id, and if so, pop the stack.

## Friday, July 18, 2014

### IOI 2014 day 2 analysis

I found day 2 much harder than day 1, and I still don't know how to solve all the problems (I am seriously impressed by those getting perfect scores). Here's what I've managed to figure out so far.

Update: I've now solved everything (in theory), and the solutions are below. The official solutions are now also available on the IOI website. I'll try coding the solutions at some point if I get time.

### Gondola

This was the easiest of the three. Firstly, what makes a valid gondola sequence? In all the subtasks of this problem, there will be two cases. If you see any of the numbers 1 to n, that immediately locks in the phase, and tells you the original gondola for every position. Otherwise, the phase is unknown. So, the constraints are that
• if the phase is known, every gondola up to n must appear in the correct spot if it appears;
• no two gondolas can have the same number.
Now we can consider how to construct a replacement sequence (and also to count them), which also shows that these conditions are sufficient. If the phase is not locked, pick it arbitrarily. Now the "new gondola" column is simply the numbers from n+1 up to the largest gondola, so picking a replacement sequence is equivalent to deciding which gondola replaces each broken gondola. We can assign each gondola greater than n that we can't see to a position (one where the final gondola number is larger), and this will uniquely determine the replacement sequence. We'll call such gondolas hidden.

For the middle set of subtasks, the simplest thing is to assign all hidden gondolas to one position, the one with the highest-numbered gondola in the final state. For counting the number of possible replacement sequences, each hidden gondola can be assigned independently, so we just multiply together the number of options, and also remember to multiply by n if the phase is unknown. In the last subtask there are too many hidden gondolas to deal with one at a time, but they can be handled in batches (those between two visible gondolas), using fast exponentiation.

### Friend

This is a weighted maximum independent set problem. On a general graph this is NP-hard, so we will need to exploit the curious way in which the graph is constructed. I haven't figured out how to solve the whole problem, but let's work through the subtasks:
1. This is small enough to use brute force (consider all subsets and check whether they are independent).
2. The graph will be empty, so the sample can consist of everyone.
3. The graph will be complete, so only one person can be picked in a sample. Pick the best one.
4. The graph will be a tree. There is a fairly standard tree DP to handle this case: for every subtree, compute the best answer, either with the root excluded or included. If the root is included, add up the root-excluded answers for every subtree; otherwise add up the best of the two for every subtree. This takes linear time.
5. In this case the graph is bipartite and the vertices are unweighted. This is a standard problem which can be solved by finding the maximum bipartite matching. The relatively simple flow-based algorithm for this is theoretically $$O(n^3)$$, but it is one of those algorithms that tends to run much faster in most cases, so it may well be sufficient here.
The final test-case clearly requires a different approach, since n can be much larger. I only managed to figure this out after getting a big hint from the SA team leader, who had seen the official solution.

We will process the operations in reverse order. For each operation, we will transform the graph into one that omits the new person, but for which the optimal solution has the same score. Let's say that the last operation had A as the host and B as the invitee, and consider the different cases:
• YourFriendsAreMyFriends: this is the simplest: any solution using B can also use A, and vice versa. So we can collapse the two vertices into one whose weight is the sum of the original weights, and use it to replace A.
• WeAreYourFriends: this is almost the same, except now we can use at most one of A and B, and which one we take (if either) has no effect on the rest of the graph. So we can replace A with a single vertex having the larger of the two weights, and delete B.
• IAmYourFriend: this is a bit trickier. Let's start with the assumption that B will form part of the sample, and add that to the output value before deleting it. However, if we later decide to use A, there will be a cost to remove B again; so A's weight decreases by the weight of B. If it ends up with negative weight, we can just clamp it to 0.
Repeat this deletion process until only the original vertex is left; the answer will be the weight of this vertex, plus the saved-up weights from the IAmYourFriend steps.

### Holiday

Consider the left-most and right-most cities that Jian-Jia visits. Regardless of where he stops, he will need to travel from the start city to one of the ends, and from there to the other end. There is no point in doing any other back-tracking, so we can tell how many days he spends travelling just from the end-points. This then tells us how many cities he has time to see attractions in, and obviously we will pick the best cities within the range.

That's immediately sufficient to solve the first test case. To solve more, we can consider an incremental approach. Fix one end-point, and gradually extend the other end-point, keeping track of the best cities (and their sum) in a priority queue (with the worst of the best cities at the front). As the range is extended, the number of cities that can be visited shrinks, so items will need to be popped. Of course, the next city in the range needs to be added each time as well. Using a binary heap, this gives an $$O(n^2\log n)$$ algorithm: a factor of n for each endpoint, and the $$\log n$$ for the priority queue operations. That's sufficient for subtask 3.  It's also good enough for subtask 2, because the left endpoint will be city 0, saving a factor of n.

For subtask 4, it is clearly not possible to consider every pair of end-points. Let's try to break things up. Assume (without loss of generality) that we move first left, then back to the start, then right. Let's compute the optimal solution for the left part and the right part separately, then combine them. The catch is that we need to know how we are splitting up our time between the two sides. So we'll need to compute the answer for each side for all possible number of days spent within each side. This seems to leave us no better off, since we're still searching within a two-dimensional space (number of days and endpoint), but it allows us to do some things differently.

We'll just consider the right-hand side. The left-hand side is similar, with minor changes because we need two days for travel (there and back) instead of one. Let f(d) be the optimal end-point if we have d days available. Then with a bit of work one can show that f is non-decreasing (provided one is allowed to pick amongst ties). If we find f(d) for d=1, 2, 3, ... in that order, it doesn't really help: we're only, on average, halving the search space. But we can do better by using a divide-and-conquer approach: if we need to find f for all $$d \in [0, D)$$ then we start with $$d = \frac{D}{2}$$ to subdivide the space, and then recursively process each half of the interval on disjoint subintervals of the cities. This reduces the search space to $$O(n\log n)$$.

This still leaves the problem of efficiently finding the total number of attractions that can be visited for particular intervals and available days. The official solution uses one approach, based on a segment tree over the cities, sorted by number of attractions rather than position. The approach I found is, I think, simpler. Visualise the recursion described above as a tree; instead of working depth-first (i.e., recursively), we work breadth-first. We make $$O(\log n)$$ passes, and in each pass we compute f(d) where d is an odd multiple of $$2^i$$ (with $$i$$ decreasing with each pass). Each pass can be done in a single incremental process, similar to the way we tackled subpass 2. The difference is that each time we cross into the next subinterval, we need to increase $$d$$, and hence bring more cities into consideration. To do this, we need either a second priority queue of excluded cities, or we can replace the priority queue with a balanced binary tree. Within each pass, d can only be incremented $$O(n)$$ times, so the total running time will be $$O(n\log n)$$ per pass, or $$O(n\log n \log n)$$ overall.

## IOI 2014 day 1

Since there is no online judge, I haven't tried actually coding any of these. So these ideas are not validated yet. You can find the problems here.

### Rails

I found this the most difficult of the three to figure out, although coding it will not be particularly challenging.

Firstly, we can note that distances are symmetric: a route from A to B can be reflected in the two tracks to give a route from B to A. So having only $$\frac{n(n-1)}{2}$$ queries is not a limitation, as we can query all distances. This might be useful in tackling the first three subtasks, but I'll go directly to the hardest subtask.

If we know the position and type of a station, there is one other that we can immediately locate: the closest one. It must have the opposite type and be reached by a direct route. Let station X be the closest to station 0. The other stations can be split into three groups:
1. d(X, Y) < d(X, 0): these are reached directly from station X and of type C, so we can locate them exactly.
2. d(0, X) + d(X, Y) = d(0, Y), but not of type 1: these are reached from station 0 via station X, so they lie to the left of station 0.
3. All other stations lie to the right of station X.
Let's now consider just the stations to the right of X, and see how to place them. Let's take them in increasing distance from 0. This ensures that we encounter all the type D stations in order, and any type C station will be encountered at some point after the type D station used to reach it. Suppose Y is the right-most type D station already encountered, and consider the distances for a new station Z. Let $$z = d(0, Z) - d(0, Y) - d(Y, Z)$$. If Z is type C, then there must be a type D at distance $$\frac{z}{2}$$ to the left of Y. On the other hand, if Z is of type D (and lies to the right of Y), then there must be a type C station at distance $$\frac{z}{2}$$ to the left of Y. In the first case, we will already have encountered the station, so we can always distinguish the two cases, and hence determine the position and type of Z.
The stations to the left of station zero can be handled similarly, using station X as the reference point instead of station 0.
How many queries is this? Every station Z except 0 and X accounts for at most three queries: d(0, Z), d(X, Z) and d(Y, Z), where Y can be different for each Z. This gives $$3(n-2) + 1$$, which I think can be improved to $$3(n-2)$$ just by counting more carefully. Either way, it is sufficient to solve all the subtasks.

### Wall

This is a fairly standard interval tree structure problem, similar to Mountain from IOI 2005 (but a little easier). Each node of the tree contains a range to which its children are clamped. To determine the value of any element of the wall, start at the leaf with a value of 0 and read up the tree, clamping the value to the range in each node in turn. Initially, each node has the range [0, inf). When applying a new instruction, it is done top-down, and clamps are pushed down the tree whenever recursion is necessary.

An interesting aspect of the problem is that it is offline, in that only the final configuration is requested and all the information is provided up-front. This makes me think that there may be an alternative solution that processes the data in a different order, but I can't immediately see a nicer solution than the one above.

### Game

I liked this problem, partly because I could reverse-engineer a solution from the assumption that it is always possible to win, and partly because it requires neither much algorithm/data-structure training (like Wall) nor tricky consideration of cases (like Rails). Suppose Mei-Yu knows that certain cities are connected. If there are any flights between the cities that she has not asked about, then she can win simply by saving one of these flights for last, since it will not affect whether the country is connected. It follows that for Jian-Jia to win, he must always answer no when asked about a flight between two components that Mei-Yu does not know to be connected, unless this is the last flight between these components?

What if he always answers yes to the last flight between two components? In this case he will win. As long as there are at least two components left, there are uncertain edges between every pair of them, so Mei-Yu can't know whether any of them is connected any other. All edges within a component are known, so the number of components can only become one after the last question.

What about complexity? We need to keep track of the number of edges between each pair of components, which takes $$O(N^2)$$ space. Most operations will just decrement one of these counts. There will be $$N - 1$$ component-merging operations, each of which requires a linear-time merging of these edge counts and updating a vertex-to-component table. Thus, the whole algorithm requires $$O(N^2)$$ time. This is optimal given that Mei-Yu will ask $$O(N^2)$$ questions.

## Monday, June 30, 2014

### ICPC Problem H: Pachinko

Problem A has been covered quite well elsewhere, so I won't discuss it. That leaves only problem H. I started by reading the Google translation of a Polish writeup by gawry. The automatic translation wasn't very good, but it gave me one or two ideas I borrowed. I don't know how my solution compares in length of code, but I consider it much simpler conceptually.

This is a fairly typical Markov process, where a system is in some state, and each timestep it randomly selects one state as a function of the current state. One variation is that the process stops once the ball reaches a target, whereas Markov processes don't terminate. I was initially going to model that as the ball always moving from the target to itself, but things would have become slightly complicated.

Gawry has a nice way of making this explicitly a matrix problem. Set up the matrix M as for a Markov process i.e., $$M_{i,j}$$ is the probability of a transition from state j to state i. However, for a target state j, we set $$M_{i,j}=0$$ for all i. Now if $$b$$ is our initial probability vector (equal probability for each empty spot in the first row), then $$M^t b$$ represents the probability of the ball being in each position (and the game not having previously finished) after $$t$$ timesteps. We can then say that the expected amount of time the ball spends in each position is given by $$\sum_{t=0}^{\infty} M^t b$$. The sum of the elements in this vector is the expected length of a game and we're told that it is less than $$10^9$$, so we don't need to worry about convergence. However, that doesn't mean that the matrix series itself converges: Gawry points out that if there are unreachable parts of the game with no targets, then the series won't converge. We fix that by doing an initial flood-fill to find all reachable cells and only use those in the matrix. Gawry then shows that under the right conditions, the series converges to $$(I - M)^{-1} b$$.

This is where my solution differs. Gawry dismisses Gaussian elimination, because the matrix can be up to 200,000 square. However, this misses the fact that it is banded: by numbering cells left-to-right then top-to-bottom, we ensure that every non-zero entry in the matrix is at most W cells away from the main diagonal. Gaussian elimination (without pivoting) preserves this property. We can exploit this both to store the matrix compactly, and to perform Gaussian elimination in $$O(W^3H)$$ time.

One concern is the "without pivoting" caveat. I was slightly surprised that my first submission passed. I think it is possible to prove correctness, however. Gaussian elimination without pivoting is known (and easily provable) to work on strictly column diagonally dominant matrices. In our case the diagonal dominance is weak: columns corresponding to empty cells have a sum of zero, those corresponding to targets have a 1 on the diagonal and zeros elsewhere. However, the matrix is also irreducible, which I think is enough to guarantee that there won't be any division by zero.

EDIT: actually it's not guaranteed to be irreducible, because the probabilities can be zero and hence it's possible to get from A to B without being able to get from B to A. But I suspect that it's enough that one can reach a target from every state.

## Saturday, June 28, 2014

### ICPC Problem L: Wires

While this problem wasn't too conceptually difficult, it requires a lot of code (my solution is about 400 lines), and careful implementation of a number of geometric algorithms. A good chunk of the code comes from implementing a rational number class in order to precisely represent the intersection points of the wires. It is also very easy to suffer from overflow: I spent a long time banging my head against an assertion failure on the server until I upgraded my rational number class to use 128-bit integers everywhere, instead of just for comparisons.

The wires will divide the space up into connected regions. The regions can be represented in a planar graph, with edges between regions that share an edge. The problem is then to find the shortest path between the regions containing the two new end-points.

My solution works in a number of steps:
1. Find all the intersection points between wires, and the segments between intersection points. This just tests every wire against every other wire. The case of two parallel wires sharing an endpoint needs to be handled carefully. For each line, I sort the intersection points along the line. I used a dot produce for this, which is where my rational number class overflowed, but would probably have been safer to just sort lexicographically. More than two lines can meet at an intersection point, so I used a std::map to assign a unique ID to each intersection point (I'll call them vertices from here on).
2. Once the intersection points along a line have been sorted, one can identify the segments connecting them. I create two copies of each segment, one in each direction. With each vertex A I store a list of all segments A->B. Each pair is stored contiguously so that it is trivial to find its partner. Each segment is considered to belong to the region to its left as one travels A->B.
3. The segments emanating from each vertex are sorted by angle. These comparisons could easily cause overflows again, but one can use a handy trick: instead of using the vector for the segment in an angle comparison, one can use the vector for the entire wire. It has identical direction but has small integer coordinates.
4. Using the sorted lists from the previous step, each segment is given a pointer to its following segment from the same region. In other words, if one is tracing the boundary of the region and one has just traced A->B, the pointer will point to B->C.
5. I extract the contours of the regions. A region typically consists of an outer contour and optionally some holes. The outermost region lacks an outer contour (one could add a big square if one needed to, but I didn't). A contour is found by following the next pointers. A case that turns out to be inconvenient later is that some segments might be part of the contour but not enclose any area. This can make a contour disappear completely, in which case it is discarded. Any remaining contours have the property that two adjacent segments are not dual to each other, although it is still possible to both sides of an edge to belong to the same contour.
6. Each contour is identified as an outer contour or a hole. With integer coordinates I could just measure the signed area of the polygon, but that gets nasty with rational coordinates. Instead, I pick the lexicographically smallest vertex in the contour and examine the angle between the two incident segments (this is why it is important that there is a non-trivial angle between them). I also sort the contours by this lexicographically smallest vertex, which causes any contour to sort before any other contours it encloses.
7. For each segment I add an edge of weight 1 from its containing region to the containing region of its dual.
8. For each hole, I search backwards through the other contours to find the smallest non-hole that contains it. I take one vertex of the hole and do a point-in-polygon test. Once again, some care is needed to avoid overflows, and using the vectors for the original wires proves useful. One could then associate the outer contour and the holes it contains into a single region object, but instead I just added an edge to the graph to join them with weight 0. In other words, one can travel from the boundary of a region to the outside of a hole at no cost.
9. Finally, I identify the regions containing the endpoints of the new wire, using the same search as in the previous step.
After all this, we still need to implement a shortest path search - but by this point that seems almost trivial in comparison.

What is the complexity? There can be $$O(M^2)$$ intersections and hence also $$O(M^2)$$ contours, but only $$O(M)$$ of them can be holes (because two holes cannot be part of the same connected component). The slowest part is the fairly straightforward point-in-polygon test which tests each hole against each non-hole segment, giving $$O(M^3)$$ time. There are faster algorithms for doing point location queries, so it is probably theoretically possible to reduce this to $$O(M^2\log N)$$ or even $$O(M^2)$$, but certainly not necessary for this problem.

### ICPC Problem J: Skiing

I'll start by mentioning that there is also some analysis discussion on the Topcoder forums, which includes alternative solutions that in some cases I think are much nicer than mine.

So, on to problem J - which no team solved, and only one team attempted. I'm a little surprised by this, since it's the sort of problem where one can do most of the work on paper while someone else is using the machine. A possible reason is that it's difficult to determine the runtime: I just coded it up and hoped for the best.

It is a slightly annoying problem for a few reasons. Firstly, there are a few special cases, because $$v_y$$ or $$a$$ can be zero. We also have to find the lexicographically smallest answer.

Let's deal with those special cases first. If $$v_y = 0$$ then we can only reach targets with $$y = 0$$. If $$a \not= 0$$ then we can reach all of them in any order, otherwise we can only reach those with $$x = 0$$. To get the lexicographically smallest answer, just go through them in order and print out those that are reachable. I actually dealt with the $$v_y \not= 0$$, $$a = 0$$ case as part of my general solution, but is also easy enough to deal with. We can only reach targets with $$x = 0$$, and we can only reach them in increasing order of y. One catch is that targets are not guaranteed to have distinct coordinates, so if two targets have the same coordinates we must be careful to visit them in lexicographical order. I handled this just by using a stable sort.

So, onwards to the general case. Before we can start doing any high-level optimisation, we need to start by answering this question: if we are at position P with X velocity $$v$$ and want to pass through position Q, what possible velocities can we arrive with? I won't prove it formally, but it's not hard to believe that to arrive with the smallest velocity, you should start by accelerating (at the maximum acceleration) for some time, then decelerate for the rest of the time. Let's say that the total time between P and Q is $$T$$, the X separation is $$x$$, the initial acceleration time is $$T - t$$ and the final deceleration time is $$t$$. Some basic integration then gives
$x = v(T-t)+\tfrac{1}{2}a(T-t)^2 + (v+a(T-t))t - \tfrac{1}{2}at^2.$
This gives a quadratic in $$t$$ where the linear terms conveniently cancel, leaving
$t = \sqrt{\frac{vT+\tfrac{1}{2}aT^2-x}{a}}$
The final velocity is just $$v+aT-2at$$. We can also find the largest possible arrival velocity simply by replacing $$a$$ with $$-a$$. Let's call these min and max velocity functions $$V_l(v, T, x)$$ and $$V_h(v, T, x)$$.

More generally, if we can leave P with a given range of velocities $$[v_0, v_1]$$, with what velocities can we arrive at Q? We first need to clamp the start range to the range from which we can actually reach Q i.e., that satisfy $$|vT - x| \le \frac{1}{2}aT^2$$. A bit of calculus shows that $$V_l$$ and $$V_h$$ are decreasing functions of $$v$$, so the arrival range will be $$[V_l(v_1), V_h(v_0)]$$.

Finally, we are ready to tackle the problem as a whole, with multiple targets. We will use dynamic programming to answer this question, starting from the last target (highest Y): if I start at target i and want to hit a total of j targets, what are the valid X velocities at i? The answer will in general be a set of intervals. We will make a pseudo-target at (0, 0), and the answer will then be the largest j for which 0.0 is a valid velocity at this target.

Computing the DP is generally straightforward, except that the low-level queries we need are the reverse of those we discussed above i.e. knowing the arrival velocities we need to compute departure velocities. No problem, this sort of physics is time-reversible, so we just need to be careful about which signs get flipped. For each (i, j) we consider all options for the next target, back-propagate the set of intervals from that next target, and merge them into the answer for (i, j). Of course, for $$j = 1$$ we use the interval $$(-\infty, \infty)$$.

The final inconvenience is that we must produce a lexicographical minimum output. Now we will see the advantage of doing the DP in the direction we chose. We build a sequence forwards, keeping track of the velocity interval for our current position. Initially the position will be (0, 0) and the velocity interval will be [0.0, 0.0]. To test whether a next position is valid, we forward-propagate the velocity interval to this next position, and check whether it has non-empty intersection with the set of velocities that would allow us to hit the required number of remaining targets. We then just take the next valid position with the lowest ID.

What is the complexity? It could in theory be exponential, because every path through the targets could induce a separate interval in the interval set. However, in reality the intervals merge a lot, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is some way to prove that there can only be a polynomial number of intervals to consider. My solution still ran pretty close to the time limit, though.