CodeJam 2014: How to solve task "New Lottery Game"?

Question

I want to know efficient approach for the New Lottery Game problem.

The Lottery is changing! The Lottery used to have a machine to generate a random winning number. But due to cheating problems, the Lottery has decided to add another machine. The new winning number will be the result of the bitwise-AND operation between the two random numbers generated by the two machines.

To find the bitwise-AND of X and Y, write them both in binary; then a bit in the result in binary has a 1 if the corresponding bits of X and Y were both 1, and a 0 otherwise. In most programming languages, the bitwise-AND of X and Y is written X&Y.

For example: The old machine generates the number 7 = 0111. The new machine generates the number 11 = 1011. The winning number will be (7 AND 11) = (0111 AND 1011) = 0011 = 3.

With this measure, the Lottery expects to reduce the cases of fraudulent claims, but unfortunately an employee from the Lottery company has leaked the following information: the old machine will always generate a non-negative integer less than A and the new one will always generate a non-negative integer less than B.

Catalina wants to win this lottery and to give it a try she decided to buy all non-negative integers less than K.

Given A, B and K, Catalina would like to know in how many different ways the machines can generate a pair of numbers that will make her a winner.

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For small input we can check all possible pairs but how to do it with large inputs. I guess we represent the binary number into string first and then check permutations which would give answer less than K. But I can't seem to figure out how to calculate possible permutations of 2 binary strings.

Answer 1

I used a general DP technique that I described in a lot of detail in another answer.

We want to count the pairs (a, b) such that a < A, b < B and a & b < K.

The first step is to convert the numbers to binary and to pad them to the same size by adding leading zeroes. I just padded them to a fixed size of 40. The idea is to build up the valid a and b bit by bit.

Let f(i, loA, loB, loK) be the number of valid suffix pairs of a and b of size 40 - i. If loA is true, it means that the prefix up to i is already strictly smaller than the corresponding prefix of A. In that case there is no restriction on the next possible bit for a. If loA ist false, A[i] is an upper bound on the next bit we can place at the end of the current prefix. loB and loK have an analogous meaning.

Now we have the following transition:

long long f(int i, bool loA, bool loB, bool loK) {
  // TODO add memoization
  if (i == 40)
    return loA && loB && loK;
  int hiA = loA ? 1: A[i]-'0';  // upper bound on the next bit in a
  int hiB = loB ? 1: B[i]-'0';  // upper bound on the next bit in b
  int hiK = loK ? 1: K[i]-'0';  // upper bound on the next bit in a & b
  long long res = 0;
  for (int a = 0; a <= hiA; ++a)
    for (int b = 0; b <= hiB; ++b) {
      int k = a & b;
      if (k > hiK) continue;
      res += f(i+1, loA || a < A[i]-'0',
                    loB || b < B[i]-'0',
                    loK || k < K[i]-'0');
    }
  return res;
}

The result is f(0, false, false, false).

The runtime is O(max(log A, log B)) if memoization is added to ensure that every subproblem is only solved once.