Solving ITA's Word Numbers Puzzle | Hacker News Reader

Solving ITA's Word Numbers Puzzle

nathan.ca

30 pointsNathanWong24 comments

This is a fun puzzle. Here's my take on it. I stopped reading the article after the introduction so I could attack the problem fresh, so hopefully this isn't the same as what the author did.

The trick is working backwards. We want to quickly count the number of occurrences of each letter in the list of number words. Knowing how to do that, we just have to do a linear scan over the cumulative counts for A, B, C, ... to find the interval into which the query index fits. If it helps prime your intuition, my inspiration is counting sort with the counts evaluated partly analytically.

Number words can be divided into a fixed set of recurring components: one, two, three, four, ..., ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, ..., twenty, thirty, ..., hundred, thousand, million, billion. Build an inverse index that maps each letter to the set of all component words that contain the letter, paired with an occurrence count. For example, the inverse index would map T to {(two, 1), (three, 1), (ten, 1), (twelve, 1), (thirteen, 2), ...}.

With this in hand, the problem is reduced to counting the number of each component word in the string.

Let's consider that subproblem for the component 'nine' ('nineteen' and 'ninety' are separate components) for numbers with up to n digits. Numbers with the digit pattern xxx...xxx9 each contribute one occurrence of 'nine', and there are 10^(n-1) such numbers ('... nine'). Likewise each xxx...xxx9xx contributes an occurrence, and there are again 10^(n-1) such numbers ('... nine hundred ...'), the pattern xxx...xxx9xxx has 10^(n-1) members ('... nine thousand ...'), etc.

This same analysis applies to all ones components (one, two, three, ..., nine), and an analogous analysis applies to other components.

I have a ruby solution that takes 20s to run on a machine that's about 5 years old.

I just brute-force generate the strings from 1-999999, as well as "million-prefix" strings of the form "(1-999)million". These are then sorted in the same array. Also compute the sum of the length of the strings from 1-999999 while we're at it.

Then, run through the sorted array, keeping a running total of the length. Each time you hit a "million-prefix" string, it's easy to compute the total length of all the numbers that start with the prefix - it's just the sum of the string lengths from 1-999999 plus 999999*prefix-length.

If this subtotal doesn't push you past the 51B limit, then keep going. If it does, then run through the 1-999999 numbers only, adding each one to the total individually, until you reach the magic 51B mark.

The practical upshot is that you can skip millions of numbers at a time.

Ugly code here: http://codepuppies.com/ben/ita/t2.txt

Cool! A very nice read.. thanks for sharing. I actually looked at that puzzle but decided strawberry fields was more interesting. My solution comes up with reasonably efficient answers within a minute or so, even on a 1000h eeepc :) I don't have a nice writeup like you but the README contains a brief explanation (in concordance with the rules for the puzzle): https://github.com/BruceJillis/Strawberry-Fields I decided to post this because you mention constraints and my solution is written up in a constraint logic programming language (eclipse), it might be interesting to translate your solution and compare.

http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber... I read this write-up of the problem years ago that takes a different approach.

Ken and Dylan's solution is brilliant, and readable, but has a lot of magic. Don't be surprised if you read (and run!) their solution end-to-end, understanding each piece, but still don't believe that the whole thing works!

(Note, the solution is in 4 parts, but Part 4 is not in the table of contents.)

First, understand that it relies on Haskell's built-in (implicit/invisible) theorem-prover, lazines, and purity to work. It is not possible to directly translate their code into (much uglier) code in C/Python/Java and expect is to work.

Second, while they tersely explain all the math they use, like "automatic (formal) differentiation", "seminearring", it really helps if you are already familiar with these concepts from a college "modern algebra" class, in order to maintain the intuition in your head to follow the exposition.

Third, a lot of the magic of Haskell isn't explicitly explained in their blog post, such as:

0. Where is the, um, "execution" ("main" function)? When not using the IO monad or other explicitly sequential operations, Haskell programs do not have any instructions (loops or command statement), only declarations and definitions/assigments. The only "instruction" in the program is the command to print the value of a function on the console. Haskell's built-in call-by-need need-resolution engine then does all the work of deciding which functions need to be called in which order to compute and print the one top-level function.

1. why differentiation works to solve this problem (Part 2). (The reason is not hard to see if you play with the functions, but is hard to see just by reading: The concrete examples of string lists are all in section 1, but differentiation is defined in section 2, and they don't show any examples of differentiation applied to concrete lists of strings.)

2. Why summing over vast trees is efficient. (Part 2 and Part 3) Each node in the tree contains a reference to (basically) a small function, describing how to combine its branches. That function is collapsed to a value the first time it's value is needed (Haskell's lazy call-by-need semantics).

Note that the tree is extremely redundant! It contains something like (but not quite) log (n) distinct nodes in a tree of n total nodes representing n integeres. The use of indirection, which is implicit in Haskell (like Java!), means that by computing the a sum over part of the tree, we get many other computations for free, even though the code superficially appears to copying values.

Haskell's purity (and therefore, equivalence between functions and their results), means that each function call (including arguments is only ever evaluated more than once, without any explicit visible coding of that evaluation+memoization (not like Java).

3. Why sorting is efficient. The reason is basically the same as why summing is efficient (above).

Interesting that this and the OP's solutions result in different answers.

That's because you missed the hidden Part 4 where Shan&Thurston finish their solution:

http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...

Ah, good call. Very easy to miss that link.

couldn't you just use "sort" to sort the file on disk and then offset into the file to find the answer? i would expect sort to work fine for files larger than memory (and if it doesn't i bet there is some tool that does - merge sort with tapes is not so old...)

[edit: you'd need to add, then strip, carriage returns between numbers, i guess]

You could, but that's incredibly slow.

really? for what value of incredibly? i bet it's way faster than writing all that code.

[edit: to save people reading below i missed the sum requirement, which this wouldn't do, and a rough back of the envelope calculations suggests it would take about the same length of time as the code took. so i was wrong, sorry...]

Print "e"

is even faster, but also missed the point.

well, before i realised i had missed the sum part (which i suspect was added to foil lazy people like me) i would have argued that perhaps they are looking for someone who knows enough about the tools already available to find the fastest solution.

not that i have anything against the approaches here - the dynamic programming approach over trees is really cool and i probably wouldn't have thought of it myself. i just thought it amusing that there seemed to be a simpler way.

I didn't have 70 GB of disk space free (two small SSDs in my laptop), but I just started running it on my old machine and will let you know the results. The grammar, parser, and traversal functions took me somewhere between two and three hours in total to think up and write; my gut feeling is that writing and sorting 70 GB of data on a spinning disk would be slower, though I may be wrong.

Another issue with using sort that you still need the sum of the numbers. You could store this as "wordnum;realnum", but now you've got over 100 GB of data to sort, and you still need to parse this out when you do your single pass after to get to the correct byte count. You could spend some time optimizing the sorting format (again using tokens), but now you're spending time doing work that's getting you even closer to an actual solution in code.

The coded solution is also scalable, although you could argue the necessity of scaling in this context. If a company were to introduce this puzzle looking for some byte in the first trillion numbers sorted (instead of billion), you'd be looking to sort several terabytes of data on disk; the constant memory solution, once tweaked to include the billions case in the same way the millions case is handled, would take roughly 15 minutes to run.

ah, sorry - i had missed the sum of numbers. also, after reading the sort man page, for fast sorting you may need to write out the data in a set of files (each of which fits in memory), sort each separately (well, sort before writing), and then use sort --merge to join them.

i'm impressed at how quickly you wrote the code. i guess it would have been better to say "i bet it would be quicker for me...".

[edit] actually, you can probably work it out. say you get 10MB/s to a disc. you need to write 10 files (each 7GB) which takes 700s or about 10 minutes each. so it's about 100 minutes for writing them (sorted in memory first) and then about 100 minutes reading them in the merge (i'm thinking you can filter the output to find the answer without writing again). so you'd expect around 3 hours, or about the time the code took to write.

[edit 2 to avoid yet more posts] thanks + good luck with the job application (i did one of their questions a year or two back and, while it was really interesting, all i got as a reply was "we've finished hiring this year"... although in their defense - and perhaps like you - i was doing it more for fun anyway)]

Upvoted you for the interesting discussion.

After I saw your first comment, I started writing out all billion numbers. It appears to be getting exponentially slower, which I suppose is to be expected as the file gets too big to fit in available contiguous blocks (there was only 100 GB free before it started).

It's been running for about an hour and is only half done, although writing 7 GB files would definitely be much faster; I don't know if sort --merge creates one big file at the end or not, but there are ways around that since it would be the bottleneck. It does sound like it could be done with sort in a semi-reasonable amount of time, although there'd still be more work to do once it's sorted.

In terms of writing the code itself, the parser is pretty similar to a toy computer algebra system I had written in the past (it's much simpler), so I had some pre-disposition to it in that sense, and the traversal is fairly straight forward given the grammar. I chose a problem that I thought I could solve in an afternoon because I knew I had real work to do the following Monday and still had to write the blog post, and Parkinson's Law may have helped me push through it a bit too. :)

Edit to reply to edit: This puzzle is actually retired from ITA's fleet, and I'm not interested in applying to ITA/Google anyway. I'm happily employed, and actually this is sort of the reverse: I'm looking to hire remote software devs at BuySellAds.com and was hoping this would pique the interest of the qualified segment of devs looking for a job.

My thoughts are this problem is complex regardless. It's pretty good that you could solve this all in one afternoon.

Are there any blogs, programming books, that you recommend that would help, someone improve their programming skills?

Thanks

I subscribe to the school of thought that you learn by doing, so my best advice is to put yourself out there and write some code. I've read lots of blogs, and a small handful of programming books (K&R, parts of SICP, parts of CLRS, Programming Pearls), but at each step I took it upon myself to actually do what the author was doing. Reading code or watching lectures isn't going to make you a better programmer any more than watching tennis will make you a better tennis player. You presumably already know the rules, you just need to practice to get to the next level.

Try writing anything that sounds fun. Write your own JSON parser, or a trie, or a B+ tree, or an implementation of the travelling salesman or knapsack problems. Wikipedia will get you started on all of these, and from there you can write the code. Too often people promote the idea that "Well, JSON libraries exist, why write your own?", but that misses the point. For one, it's fun. Professional tennis players exist too, and I am definitely never going to be as good as they are, but that doesn't mean it's not worth playing tennis if I enjoy doing so. More importantly, though, if you've written your own JSON parser, then the next time a new protocol or file format comes out and your language of choice isn't officially supported, you'll be able to write your own and be ahead of the game. All of these skills are transferable.

An added bonus is that when you go to apply for programming jobs, your portfolio of fun side projects will speak volumes about your ability to code. Don't worry that you don't have the best, most efficient, most popular JSON parser. The important part is that you spent your personal time bettering yourself, and that you are interested in being great at what you do.

This is pretty cool. It's a shame they haven't retired the problem I solved to get an interview there.

Why is it a shame that they haven't retired something cool?

If they had retired it, then we could discuss it :)

Hint: Gauss. Sum of numbers 1 to 100.

Using Gauss's insight, Ruby can solve 10,000 times faster than a naive C solution.

I solved this a while back, while high on drugs my dentist gave me. Blog post is down, but code is here: http://refactormycode.com/codes/8-integer-puzzle

What of the magic numbers in this solution?

ThousandRange: def child_values @thousands * 1_000_000 + 499500 end

  def child_sizes
    NumberWriter.write(@thousands * 1_000).size * 1_000 + 18440
  end

MillionRange:

  def child_values
    @millions * 1_000_000_000_000 + 499_999_500_000
  end
  
  def child_sizes
    NumberWriter.write(@millions * 1_000_000).size * 1_000_000 + 44_872_000
  end

The size of the strings for that range of numbers. So, e.g. all of the strings starting with "twenty" will have that length of string (here, 6) * 10, plus the "one" in "twentyone", etc. The "one", "two", "three", etc have the same length whether they're preceded by "twenty" or "thirty".

Account for the repeated strings "hundred", "thousand" or "million" and what follows them and you'll get the magic numbers above.

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