Find nth int with 10 set bits - optimization

Question

Find the nth int with 10 set bits
n is an int in the range 0<= n <= 30 045 014
The 0th int = 1023, the 1st = 1535 and so on
snob() same number of bits,
returns the lowest integer bigger than n with the same number of set bits as n
int snob(int n) {
int a=n&-n, b=a+n;
return b|(n^b)/a>>2;
}
calling snob n times will work
int nth(int n){
int o =1023;
for(int i=0;i<n;i++)o=snob(o);
return o;
}
example
https://ideone.com/ikGNo7
Is there some way to find it faster?
I found one pattern but not sure if it's useful.
using factorial you can find the "indexes" where all 10 set bits are consecutive
1023 << x = the (x+10)! / (x! * 10!) - 1 th integer
1023<<1 is the 10th
1023<<2 is the 65th
1023<<3 the 285th
...
Btw I'm not a student and this is not homework.
EDIT:
Found an alternative to snob()
https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#NextBitPermutation
int lnbp(int v){
int t = (v | (v - 1)) + 1;
return t | ((((t & -t) / (v & -v)) >> 1) - 1);
}

Answer 1

I have built an implementation that should satisfy your needs.
/** A lookup table to see how many combinations preceeded this one */
private static int[][] LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS;
/** The number of possible combinations with i bits */
private static int[] NBR_COMBINATIONS;
static {
LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS = new int[Integer.SIZE][Integer.SIZE];
for (int bit = 0; bit < Integer.SIZE; bit++) {
// Ignore less significant bits, compute how many combinations have to be
// visited to set this bit, i.e.
// (bit = 4, pos = 5), before came 0b1XXX and 0b1XXXX, that's C(3, 3) + C(4, 3)
int nbrBefore = 0;
// The nth-bit can be only encountered after pos n
for (int pos = bit; pos < Integer.SIZE; pos++) {
LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS[bit][pos] = nbrBefore;
nbrBefore += nChooseK(pos, bit);
}
}
NBR_COMBINATIONS = new int[Integer.SIZE + 1];
for (int bits = 0; bits < NBR_COMBINATIONS.length; bits++) {
NBR_COMBINATIONS[bits] = nChooseK(Integer.SIZE, bits);
assert NBR_COMBINATIONS[bits] > 0; // Important for modulo check. Otherwise we must use unsigned arithmetic
}
}
private static int nChooseK(int n, int k) {
assert k >= 0 && k <= n;
if (k > n / 2) {
k = n - k;
}
long nCk = 1; // (N choose 0)
for (int i = 0; i < k; i++) {
// (N choose K+1) = (N choose K) * (n-k) / (k+1);
nCk *= (n - i);
nCk /= (i + 1);
}
return (int) nCk;
}
public static int nextCombination(int w, int n) {
// TODO: maybe for small n just advance naively
// Get the position of the current pattern w
int nbrBits = 0;
int position = 0;
while (w != 0) {
final int currentBit = Integer.lowestOneBit(w); // w & -w;
final int bitPos = Integer.numberOfTrailingZeros(currentBit);
position += LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS[nbrBits][bitPos];
// toggle off bit
w ^= currentBit;
nbrBits++;
}
position += n;
// Wrapping, optional
position %= NBR_COMBINATIONS[nbrBits];
// And reverse lookup
int v = 0;
int m = Integer.SIZE - 1;
while (nbrBits-- > 0) {
final int[] bitPositions = LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS[nbrBits];
// Search for largest bitPos such that position >= bitPositions[bitPos]
while (Integer.compareUnsigned(position, bitPositions[m]) < 0)
m--;
position -= bitPositions[m];
v ^= (0b1 << m--);
}
return v;
}
Now for some explanation. LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS[bit][pos] is the core of the algorithm that makes it as fast as it is. The table is designed so that a bit pattern with k bits at positions p_0 < p_1 < ... < p_{k - 1} has a position of `\sum_{i = 0}^{k - 1}{ LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS[i][p_i] }.
The intuition is that we try to move back the bits one by one until we reach the pattern where are all bits are at the lowest possible positions. Moving the i-th bit from position to k + 1 to k moves back by C(k-1, i-1) positions, provided that all lower bits are at the right-most position (no moving bits into or through each other) since we skip over all possible combinations with the i-1 bits in k-1 slots.
We can thus "decode" a bit pattern to a position, keeping track of the bits encountered. We then advance by n positions (rolling over in case we enumerated all possible positions for k bits) and encode this position again.
To encode a pattern, we reverse the process. For this, we move bits from their starting position forward, as long as the position is smaller than what we're aiming for. We could, instead of a linear search through LOOKUP_TABLE_COMBINATION_POS, employ a binary search for our target index m but it's hardly needed, the size of an int is not big. Nevertheless, we reuse our variant that a smaller bit must also come at a less significant position so that our algorithm is effectively O(n) where n = Integer.SIZE.
I remain with the following assertions to show the resulting algorithm:
nextCombination(0b1111111111, 1) == 0b10111111111;
nextCombination(0b1111111111, 10) == 0b11111111110;
nextCombination(0x00FF , 4) == 0x01EF;
nextCombination(0x7FFFFFFF , 4) == 0xF7FFFFFF;
nextCombination(0x03FF , 10) == 0x07FE;
// Correct wrapping
nextCombination(0b1 , 32) == 0b1;
nextCombination(0x7FFFFFFF , 32) == 0x7FFFFFFF;
nextCombination(0xFFFFFFEF , 5) == 0x7FFFFFFF;

Answer 2

Let us consider the numbers with k=10 bits set.
The trick is to determine the rank of the most significant one, for a given n.
There is a single number of length k: C(k, k)=1. There are k+1 = C(k+1, k) numbers of length k + 1. ... There are C(m, k) numbers of length m.
For k=10, the limit n are 1 + 10 + 55 + 220 + 715 + 2002 + 5005 + 11440 + ...
For a given n, you easily find the corresponding m. Then the problem is reduced to finding the n - C(m, k)-th number with k - 1 bits set. And so on recursively.
With precomputed tables, this can be very fast. 30045015 takes 30 lookups, so that I guess that the worst case is 29 x 30 / 2 = 435 lookups.
(This is based on linear lookups, to favor small values. By means of dichotomic search, you reduce this to less than 29 x lg(30) = 145 lookups at worse.)
Update:
My previous estimates were pessimistic. Indeed, as we are looking for k bits, there are only 10 determinations of m. In the linear case, at worse 245 lookups, in the dichotomic case, less than 50.
(I don't exclude off-by-one errors in the estimates, but clearly this method is very efficient and requires no snob.)