Re: Very big array with combinations

From:
Jonathan Lee <chorus@shaw.ca>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 5 May 2010 06:06:37 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<30b42f38-3d66-458d-b820-21a0d63a9819@u21g2000vbr.googlegroups.com>
On May 5, 4:11 am, Bengt Kappner <ben...@yahoo.de> wrote:

int main ()
{
  std::set<std::string> myset;
  myset.insert('abc');
  return 0;

}

Would that do?


That's the idea (Except double quotes around "abc").

Questions:
1. I can't find any 'set.shuffle' method to make it appear
random before writing it out. Any idea on this?


In <algorithm> there is a function called random_shuffle().
The only caveat is that it requires a random access iterator,
which std::set doesn't have.

The solution is simple, but kinda inelegant: once you're
done generating the strings, copy them into a std::vector.
Then use random_shuffle() on that. It's a bit of a waste
of memory, but on a one-off project, who cares? And it's
really only a few lines of code.

2. Just for my interest: Isn't the insert method doing
the same as I would do by inserting manually at the
right place and comparing to neighbours? Or is this
insert() using some mechanism that's faster?


set::insert() takes advantage of the fact that std::set
keeps things in sorted order. So it can find a duplicate
with a binary search. Check Wikipedia for a description.
Basically it reduces checking N items to checking log2 N
items. On an array of size N = 2000000 that means it
only checks about 21 items. i.e., it does 1/100000th the
work.

Thank you very much!!


No problem
--Jonathan

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