Number of valid parenthesis catalan number explanation - math

While studying about catalan numbers, some of the applications that I came across were:
no of possible binary search trees using n nodes.
no of ways to draw non-intersecting chords using 2*n points on a circle.
no of ways to arrange n pairs of parenthesis.
While I understand the first two problems, how catalan numbers fit in their solution, I am not able to understand how they fit in the third problem.
Couldn't find any other useful resource on the internet which explains the HOW part. Everyone just says that it's the solution.
Can someone please explain.

Since others do not seem to agree with me that this question is off-topic, I now decide that it is on topic and provide and answer.
The Wikipedia is indeed confusing about the "number of ways to arrange n pairs of parentheses" (the second bullet point in this link.) Part of the confusion is that the order of the strings of parentheses does not match the order of the binary tree, which you do understand, or with many of the other examples.
Here is a way to transform a string of n pairs of parentheses which are correctly matched into a binary tree with n internal nodes. Consider the left-most parenthesis, which will be a left-parenthesis, together with its matching right-parenthesis. Turn the string into a node of the binary tree. The sub-string that is inside the currently-considered parentheses becomes the left child of this node, and the sub-string that is after (to the right) of the currently-considered right-parenthesis becomes the right child. Either or both sub-strings may be empty, and the currently-considered parentheses are simply removed. If either sub-string is not empty, continue this procedure recursively until all parentheses have been removed.
Here are two examples. Let's start with the string ((())). We start with
The considered-parentheses are the outermost ones. This becomes
(I did not bother drawing the external leaf nodes) then
then
which is Wikipedia's left-most binary tree with 3 internal nodes.
Now let's do another string, (())(). We start with
Again, the considered-parentheses are the outermost ones. This transforms to
And now the considered-parentheses are the first two, not the outermost ones. This becomes
which finally becomes
which is the second binary tree in Wikipedia's list.
I hope you now understand. Here is a list of all five possible strings of 3 pairs of parentheses that are correctly paired, followed by Wikipedia's list of binary trees. These lists now correspond to each other.
((())) (()()) (())() ()(()) ()()()

Related

how to find out only one digit in a int number?

Im new so if this question was already Asked (i didnt find it scrolling through the list of results though) please send me the link.
I got a math quiz and im to lazy to go through all the possibilities so i thought i can find a program instead. I know a bit about programming but not much.
Is it possible (and in what programming language, and how) to read only one digit, e.g at the 3rd Position, in a integer?
And how is an integer actually saved, in a kind of array?
Thanks!
You can get rid of any lower valued digit (the ones and tens if you only want the hundreds) by dividing with rounding/truncation. 1234/100 is 12 in most languages if you are doing integer division.
You can get rid of any higher valued digits by using taking the modulus. 12 % 10 is 2 in many languages; just find out how the modulus is done in yours. I use "modulus" meaning "divide and keep the rest only", i.e. it is the opposite of "divide with rounding"; that which is lost by rounding is the final result of the modulus.
The alternative is however to actually NOT see the input as a number and treat it as text. That way it is often easier to ignore the last 2 characters and all leading characters.

Determine if there exists a number in the array occurring k times

I want to create a divide and conquer algorithm (O(nlgn) runtime) to determine if there exists a number in an array that occurs k times. A constraint on this problem is that only a equality/inequality comparison method is defined on the objects of the array (i.e can't use <, >).
So I have tried a number of approaches including splitting the array into k pieces of equal size (approximately). The approach is similar to finding the majority item in an array, however in the majority case when you split the array, you know that one half must have a majority item if such an item exists. Any pointers or tips that one could provide to put me in the right direction ?
EDIT: To clear up a little, I am wondering whether the problem of finding the majority item by splitting the array in half and using a recursive solution can be extended to other situations where k may be n/4 or n/5 etc.
Maybe I should of phrased the question using n/k instead.
This is impossible. As a simple example of why this is impossible, consider an input with a length-n array, all elements distinct, and k=2. The only way to be sure no element appears twice is to compare every element against every other element, which takes O(n^2) time. Until you perform all possible comparisons, you cannot be sure that some pair you didn't compare isn't actually equal.

What is the difference between permutations and derangements?

I have been given a program to write difference combinations of set of number entered by user and when I researched for the same I get examples with terms permutations and derangements.
I am unable to find the clarity between the them. Also adding to that one more term is combinations. Any one please provide a simple one liner for clarity on the question.
Thanks in advance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation
The notion of permutation relates to the act of rearranging, or permuting, all the members of a set into some sequence or order (unlike combinations, which are selections of some members of the set where order is disregarded). For example, written as tuples, there are six permutations of the set {1,2,3}, namely: (1,2,3), (1,3,2), (2,1,3), (2,3,1), (3,1,2), and (3,2,1). As another example, an anagram of a word, all of whose letters are different, is a permutation of its letters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derangement
In combinatorial mathematics, a derangement is a permutation of the elements of a set such that none of the elements appear in their original position.
The number of derangements of a set of size n, usually written Dn, dn, or !n, is called the "derangement number" or "de Montmort number". (These numbers are generalized to rencontres numbers.) The subfactorial function (not to be confused with the factorial n!) maps n to !n.1 No standard notation for subfactorials is agreed upon; n¡ is sometimes used instead of !n.2

Transition Graph per alphabet?

How do you determine how many different Transition Graphs are over a particular alphabet? For example How many TG's are over the alphabet {x, y}. I am taking a class with a similar question from Daniel I. A. Cohen's book, "Introduction to computer theory." There are plenty of examples of how to create a TG but nothing to determine how many can be created per language. I'm assuming I'm looking for finite amount of TG's? Thank You very much!
There are countably infinitely many such transition graphs. One way to think about this is that you can easily construct a family of infinitely many transition graphs as follows. Suppose that I want to accept the language an for some fixed n (that is, n copies of the letter a). Then I could construct a transition graph that accepts that language as follows. Begin with a start state, then chain n new states onto the end of that state, each with a transition on 'a' to the next state. Make the last state accepting.
To see that there are only countably infinitely many of these, we can think of how we would describe these automata. We could do so by writing out the number of states in unary, then the transisions between those states as a list of tuples (start, end, character) (all encoded in binary), then the accepting states as a list of the numbers of the states in unary. Concatenated together, this is a binary string, and there are only countably many finite binary strings.

pattern matching

Suppose I have a set of tuples like this (each tuple will have 1,2 or 3 items):
Master Set:
{(A) (A,C) (B,C,E)}
and suppose I have another set of tuples like this:
Real Set: {(BOB) (TOM) (ERIC,SALLY,CHARLIE) (TOM,SALLY) (DANNY) (DANNY,TOM) (SALLY) (SALLY,TOM,ERIC) (BOB,SALLY) }
What I want to do is to extract all subsets of Tuples from the Real Set where the tuple members can be substituted to become the same as the Master Set.
In the example above, two sets would be returned:
{(BOB) (BOB,SALLY) (ERIC,SALLY,CHARLIE)}
(let BOB=A,ERIC=B,SALLY=C,CHARLIE=E)
and
{(DANNY) (DANNY,TOM) (SALLY,TOM,ERIC)}
(let DANNY=A,SALLY=B,TOM=C,ERIC=E)
Its sort of pattern matching, sort of combinatorics I guess. I really don't know how to classify this problem and what common plans of attack there are for it. What would the stackoverflow experts suggest?
Seperate your tuples into sets by size. Within each set, create a data structure that allows you to efficiently query for tuples containing a given element. The first part of this structure is your tuples as an array (so that each tuple has a cannonical index). The second set is: Map String (Set Int). This is somewhat space intensive but hopefully not prohibative.
Then, you, essentially, brute force it. For all assignments to the first master set, restrict all assignments to other master sets. For all remaining assignments to the second, restrict all assignments to the third and beyond, etc. The algorithm is basically inductive.
I should add that I don't think the problem is NP-complete so much as just flat worst-case exponential. It's not a decision problem, but an enumeration problem. And it's fairly easy to imagine scenarios of inputs that blow up exponentially.
It will be difficult to do efficiently since your problem is probably NP-complete (it includes subgraph isomorphism as a special case). That assumes the patterns and database both vary in size, though. How much data are you searching? How complicated will your patterns be? I would recommend the brute force solution first, then test if that is too slow and you need something fancier.

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