Enumerating permutations
November 14th, 2009 § 5 Comments
There are exactly n! different permutations of n numbers. This challenge was about writing a function which is able to enumerate all these permutations, i.e. function permute(n, idx) which is able to return permutation with index idx of n numbers. The requirement is of course that all these permutations must be unique – this is in order to go over all possible permutations.
Reset an array in constant time
November 5th, 2009 § 12 Comments
Ever wondered how to reset an entire array of N elements in a constant slice of time? This post will introduce the algorithm along with an implementation.
Let me lay out the problem. There’s an array of N integers. We would like to be able to reset that array (set all elements to zero), in a set amount of time – regardless of the value of N. The reset operation should take the same amount of time whether it operates on 100 elements or 10,000 of them.