Identifying Palindromes
March 31, 2015
Today’s task sounds simple but leads to a little bit of complexity.
Given an array, determine if it is a palindrome. Given a linked list, determine if it is a palindrome. Make both tests as efficient, in both time and space, as possible.
Your task is to write two programs to identify palindromes. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
String Re-ordering
March 27, 2015
Today’s exercise is a fun little interview question:
You are given a string O that specifies the desired ordering of letters in a target string T. For example, given string O = “eloh” the target string T = “hello” would be re-ordered “elloh” and the target string T = “help” would be re-ordered “pelh” (letters not in the order string are moved to the beginning of the output in some unspecified order).
Your task is to write a program that produces the requested string re-ordering. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Excellent Numbers
March 24, 2015
Today’s exercise channels our inner Project Euler:
An excellent number n has an even number of digits and, if you split the number into the front half a and the back half b, then b 2 − a 2 = n. For example, 3468 = 682 − 342 = 4624 − 1156 = 3468, so 3468 is an excellent number. The only two-digit excellent number is 48 and the only four-digit excellent number is 3468. There are eight six-digit excellent numbers, 140400, 190476, 216513, 300625, 334668, 416768, 484848, and 530901, and their sum is 2615199. What is the sum of the 10-digit excellent numbers?
Your task is to compute the sum of the 10-digit excellent numbers; in the spirit of Project Euler, your solution should take no more than one minute of computation time. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Matrix Transpose
March 20, 2015
Transposing a matrix turns rows into columns and columns into rows; for instance the transpose of the matrix below left is the matrix below right:
11 12 13 14 11 21 31
21 22 23 24 12 22 32
31 32 33 34 13 23 33
14 24 34
That’s easy enough to do when everything fits in memory, but when the matrix is stored in a file and is too big to fit in memory, things get rather harder.
Your task is to write a program that transposes a matrix to large to fit in memory. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Common Elements Of Three Arrays
March 17, 2015
We have another interview question today. There are several different ways to approach this task, so it makes for an interesting exercise:
Given three arrays of integers in non-decreasing order, find all integers common to all three arrays. For instance, given arrays [1,5,10,20,40,80], [6,7,10,20,80,100] and [3,4,15,20,30,70,80,120] the two common integers are 20 and 80. If an integer appears multiple times in each of the arrays, it should appear multiple times in the output, so with input arrays [1,5,5,5], [3,4,5,5,10] and [5,5,10,20] the correct output is [5,5].
Your task is to write a program to solve the interview question. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Prime Power Predicate
March 13, 2015
In today’s exercise we write a function that determines if a number n can be written as pk with p prime and k > 0 an integer. We looked at this function in a previous exercise where we tested each prime exponent up to the base-2 logarithm of n.
Henri Cohen describes a better way to make that determination in Algorithm 1.7.5 of his book A Course in Computational Algebraic Number Theory. He exploits Fermat’s Little Theorem and the witness to the compositeness of n that is found by the Miller-Rabin primality tester. Cohen proves that if a is a witness to the compositeness of n, in the sense of the Miller-Rabin test, then gcd(an − a, n) is a non-trivial divisor of n (that is, it is between 1 and n).
Your task is to write a program that determines if a number can be written as a prime power and, if so, returns both the prime and the exponent. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Count All Matches
March 10, 2015
Count All Matches
Today’s exercise is an interview question from Google, as reported at Career Cup:
Given two strings, find the number of times the first string occurs in the second, whether continuous or discontinuous. For instance, the string CAT appears in the string CATAPULT three times, as CATapult, CAtapulT, and CatApulT.
Your task is to write the indicated program. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below:
357 Numbers
March 6, 2015
This question arose at a job-interview site:
Find all numbers divisible only by 3, 5 and 7. For instance, 35 = 5 × 7 is included in the set, but 30 = 2 × 3 × 5 is not because of the factor of 2.
Your task is to write the requested program and determine how many numbers in the set are less than a million. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggest solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Three Powering Algorithms
March 3, 2015
In mathematics, the powering operation multiplies a number by itself a given number of times. For instance, the powering operation pow(2,3) multiplies 2 × 2 × 2 = 8.
Your task is to write three functions that implement the powering operation, with time complexities O(n), O(log n) and O(1) in the exponent. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 