RogerBW's Blog

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved sequence searching and another nested sort. (Note that this ends today.)

Task 1: Arithmetic Triplets

You are given an array (3 or more members) of integers in increasing order and a positive integer.

Write a script to find out the number of unique Arithmetic Triplets satisfying the following rules:

a) i < j < k b) nums[j] - nums[i] == diff c) nums[k] - nums[j] == diff

My approach is a straightforward one: turn the input numbers into a set, then for each number n search the set for (n + diff) and (n + diff × 2). (This may break in interesting ways if numbers are duplicated, but the problem statement leaves this undefined.)

Challenge 239 task 2 has a similar "filter a list and return the count of results" approach.

Perl:

sub arithmetictriplets($a, $diff) {
  my %vs = map {$_ => 1} @{$a};
  return grep {(exists $vs{$_+$diff}) && (exists $vs{$_+$diff*2})} @{$a};
}

I rather like the PostScript approach too. (All right, it does rely on my library code for filter and toset.)

/arithmetictriplets {
    0 dict begin
    /diff exch def
    /nums exch def
    /ns nums toset def
    nums { diff add dup ns exch known
           exch diff add ns exch known
           and } filter length
    end
} bind def

Task 2: Prime Order

You are given an array of unique positive integers greater than 2.

Write a script to sort them in ascending order of the count of their prime factors, tie-breaking by ascending value.

It's been a while since I got out the prime factoring code—Challenge 169 task 2 in fact. The multi-key sort is as seen in Challenge 238 task 2. Given those existing top and bottom layers, the new code is relatively straightforward. (I won't include the primality code here, though I converted it afresh for Scala.)

JavaScript:

function primefactorcount(n) {
    return Array.of(...primefactor(n).values()).reduce((x, y) => x + y, 0);
}

function primeorder(ints) {
    let b = ints;
    let c = new Map;
    for (let n of ints) {
        c.set(n, primefactorcount(n));
    }
    b.sort(function(aa, bb) {
        if (c.get(aa) == c.get(bb)) {
            return aa - bb;
        } else {
            return c.get(aa) - c.get(bb);
        }
                            });
    return b;
}

For some of the languages I added an integer square root function simply to keep floating point out of the execution path. It's not time-critical in these functions, being called just once in genprimes and once in primefactor, but I don't like using floats where I don't have to. It's all fairly straightforard anyway, using a modified chop search, so here's the Rust:

fn isqrt(s: usize) -> usize {
    if s <= 1 {
        return s;
    }
    let mut x0 = s / 2;
    let mut x1 = (x0 + s / x0) / 2;
    while x1 < x0 {
        x0 = x1;
        x1 = (x0 + s / x0) / 2;
    }           
    return x0;
}

Full code on github.