Exercises

Here let be listed exercises for the readers of this wiki. You can allow yourself to as many helpers and resources as you find challenging: with each problem you should either find out you know the solution or learn something new while solving it.

What's the difference between free software and open source?
Write a program in C that computes the value of pi without using float/double and any libraries except for stdio.h and stdint.h -- you can only use built-in integer types and those from stdint.h. The program must compute pi as accurately as possible (at least 2 decimals) and write the value out as base 10 decimal.
Say we have an algorithm that finds all pairs of equal numbers in an array of numbers of length N and adds all of these (unordered) pairs to a set S. The algorithm is: for i := 0 to N: for j := 0 to N: if numbers[i] == numbers[j]: add(S,set(i,j)). How can we optimize the algorithm in terms of its execution speed (i.e. make it perform fewer operations)? How did the asymptotic time complexity ("big O") class change?

Solutions

A solution to each problem should be listed here -- keep in mind there may exist other solutions that those listed here.

solution 1:

Both movements share very similar rules of licensing and technically free software and open-source are largely the same. However, free software is fundamentally aiming for the creation ethical software -- that which respects its user's freedom -- while open source is a later movement that tries to adapt free software for the business and abandons the pursuit of ethics.

solution 2:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

#define DECIMALS 10000

int main(void)
{
  int64_t previousError = 10000000000;
  uint64_t previousPi = 0;

  for (uint64_t gridSize = 2; gridSize < 200000; gridSize *= 2)
  {
    /* We'll sample a grid of points and count those that fall inside the
       circle with radius of gridSize. Thanks to the 8-symmtery of a circle we
       only sample the 1/8th of the plane. */

    uint64_t inCircle = 0;

    for (int y = 0; y < gridSize; ++y)
      for (int x = y; x <= gridSize; ++x)
        if ((x * x + y * y) / gridSize <= gridSize) // if distance is < radius
          inCircle++; // count the point

    // compute pi from the formula for circle area (area = 2 * pi * r):
    uint64_t pi = (inCircle * 8 * DECIMALS) / (gridSize * gridSize);

    int64_t error = pi - previousPi;

    if (error < 0)
      error *= -1;

    if (error > previousError) // error got bigger due to overflows, stop
    {
      puts("that's it");
      break;
    }

    previousError = error;
    previousPi = pi;

    printf("%d.%d\n",pi / DECIMALS,pi % DECIMALS);
  }
}

solution 3:

In the given algorithm we compare all numbers twice. This can be avoided by not comparing a number to previous numbers in the array (because these have already been compared). Additionally we don't have to compare the same number to itself, a number will always be equal to itself:

for i := 0 to N:
  add(S,i,i)     // no need to compare

for i := 0 to N:
  for j := i + 1 to N:
    if numbers[i] == numbers[j]:
      add(S,set(i,j))

While the first algorithm performs N^2 comparisons, the new one only needs N - 1 + N - 2 + N - 3 + ... ~= N * N / 2 = N^2 / 2 comparisons. Even though the new version is always twice as fast, its time complexity class remains the same, that is O(N^2).

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Exercises

Solutions

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