March 26, 2010

Problems solvable using Hashtable

Hashtable are extremely useful data-structure as they provide storage and retrieval in O(1) time (amortized). Several problems of algorithms can be very efficiently solved using hashtables which otherwise turn out to be quite expensive. In this post, we consider some of these problems:

Problem 1: Remove duplicate elements from an unsorted array of size N.

Solution: show

Problem 2: Find intersection of K unsorted array of N elements each. Intersection consists of elements that appear in all the K arrays.

Problem 3: How to make a linked list support operations in O(1) time. The operations on linked list can be insertion after any arbitrary valued node, deletion of any arbitrary valued node.

Problem 4: Find all unique pairs of element in an array that sum to S. For ex. If array = {2,4,6,4,6} and S = 8 then answer is {(2,6), (4,4)}

Problem 5: Consider an array containing unique elements. Find a triplet of elements in the array that sum to S (extension of problem 4). Can hash-tables improve the running time of your algorithm.

Problem 6: Consider two strings of size M, N. Perform string matching in size O(M+N).

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Thanks for your efforts.
    I did n't understand the notation NaN in the solution of Problem 1: Remove duplicate elements from an unsorted array of size N.
    Can please elaborate the meaning of short form "NaN".

    Thanks in advance

    ReplyDelete
  2. NaN corresponds to Not a Number. Equivalent to null or undefined in certain programming languages. It means that number is removed from that position.

    ReplyDelete