I wonder if it is possible to swap the top two locations on the .net IL stack without using non-stack storage. It is the sort of thing that stack machines can often do, but there does not appear to be an obvious instruction for that in IL.
The reason is that I need to calculate something a bit like f (x) + f (y). The x and y are the top two locations on the stack, and f has an IL implementation. This is trivial to do with intermediate storage but that is probably both slower and less convenient than if there was a swap.
Many thanks.
Related
So I was doing practice problems in my book and I spotted this question.
Construct an npda accepting the language L on sigma(a,b,c).
L={w: number of a= number of b+1}
so I am interpreting it as it accepts all strings that has one more a then the letter b. I believe that all the states should have a loop that has a transition (c,landa, landa) since we do not really care about the c's. After this I get really confused because there are so many cases to cover since the placement of a's and b's are arbitrary. What is the way to get this problem figured out? Thanks!!
A PDA can use a stack to remember arbitrary amounts of information. This makes PDAs infinitely more capable than finite automata. The key to determining the PDA is figuring out how the stack will be used and then building a PDA around that.
How can we use a stack to ensure the number of as is equal to the number of bs, plus one? Well, the stack can easily keep track of the running balance of symbols that have been seen. For instance, if we have seen four as and two bs, our stack might represent this fact by containing aaZ, where Z is the "bottom of stack" symbol. Of course, there are other methods we might use and other representations, but this is a particularly neat one for this class of problem. To fully explain the representation:
The stack is initially Z, just the bottom of stack symbol.
If we see an a and the top of the stack is a or Z, we add another a.
If we see an a and the top of the stack is b, we remove one b.
If we see a b and the top of the stack is b or Z, we add another b.
If we see a b and the top of the stack is a, we remove one a.
If we see a c, leave the stack alone.
If we do this over and over again for all the input, then the content of the stack will be equal to x^m, where x is whichever of a and b occurs more frequently, and m is the absolute value of the difference of the numbers of each symbol.
To accept your language, you must simply recognize the case where the input is exhausted and the stack consists is equal to aZ. This can be done by adding some state(s) and lambda/epsilon transitions to clear the stack and/or enter an accepting state.
Thanks to Peter Leupold for pointing out that the rest of the original answer got the grammar wrong. I made an attempt to fix it and didn't like how long the answer was getting, so I omitted that. I will simply add that another possibility is to produce a CFG for a language and use an algorithm to derive a PDA for it. In this case, for me, giving the PDA directly was a lot less wordy.
Ive been revisiting genetic algorithms with encoding, optimizing and decoding. My first attempt was the travelling salesman with ordered cross over which worked great. I found an article that tried to optimize a more complex genome while optimizing a 2d packing problem.
The author encodes the problem using reverse polish notation that made sense. It uses a combination of parts and either V Or H as opertors.
Ie 34H5V
With decoding the stack having to be resolved to one stack element that is my final layout. That being said, the number of operater up until a certain point must be 1 less than the number of parts up until the same point. The author then states that he used a mixed cross over by using an ordered cross over on the parts and binary crossover for the operators.
I mulled this over but i cannot understand how he seperates the parts and operators before crossing over and then recombines them before evaluating performance and they offer little details. If a binary cross over occured replacing parts with an "X" to keep the relative positions so they can be recombined after crossover but the relationship between operator and parts doesnt hold true.
Does anyone perhaps have a resource that has dealt with a similar scenario or perhaps has used this successfully.
This looked way more difficult than it actually was. When the original population is generated, you need to adhere to the limitations set out by postfix notation. When a crossover occurs you simply build a mask of the parent
Ie xxxxooxoxx
Where x is an object and o is an operaror. Once you have the mask holding the positions you can create a sting only of operators and one only of objects. The operators can be done with a binary cross over and the objects as partial map crossover. Once done you fill the mask with the value in the order they appear in each group. Since the mask was valid, the progeny is valid too.
The only issue ia getting all the possible arrangements because without it, it will all be limited to the masks. He solves this by doing a swap mutation dictated by the mutation rates.
Select an item at random.
If the item is an operator then
A. Swithc the operator to another kind
B. Select another. If its an object then make sure the requirementa are met and if so then switch.
I have a collection of circles, each of which may or may not intersect one or more other circles in the collection. I want to group these circles such that each "group" contains all circles such that every member of the group intersects at least one other member of the group, and such that no member of any group intersects any member of any other group. I have come up with the following VB.NET/pseudocode algorithm to solve this problem on a single thread:
Dim groups As New List(Of List(Of Circle))
For Each circleToClassify In allCircles
Dim added As Boolean
For Each group In groups
For Each circle In group
If circleToClassify.Intersects(circle) Then
group.Add(circleToClassify)
added = True
Exit For
End If
Next
If added Then
Exit For
End If
Next
If Not added Then
Dim newGroup As New List(Of Circle)
newGroup.Add(circleToClassify)
groups.Add(newGroup)
End If
Next
Return groups
Or in English
Take each item from the collection of circles
Check if it intersects with any member of any existing group (Bear in mind a "group" may only contain a single circle)
If the circle does intersect in the aforementioned manner add it to the appropriate group
Otherwise create a new group with this circle as its only member
Go to step 1.
What I want to be able to do is perform this task using an arbitrary number of threads. However, I haven't got very far at all as all solutions I've come up with so far will just end up executing serially due to locking.
Can anyone provide any tips on what I want to be thinking about to achieve this multithreading?
TLDR
The best multithreaded solutions avoid sharing or perform read-only sharing. (And hence don't need locks.)
Consider partitioning your work so that threads don't share result data, and then merging each thread's results.
Note that when you strip away the detail of detecting whether groups of circles intersect, you are really dealing with a connected components graph theory problem. There's plenty of useful material on this subject online. And in fact you may find it much easier and sufficiently fast to simply apply a breadth first search algorithm to find connected components.
Detail
When doing multi-threaded development, first prize is to implement the threads in such a way as to minimise the number of locks. In the most trivial case: if they don't share any data, they don't need locks at all. However, if you can guarantee that the shared data won't be modified while the threads are running: then you don't need locks in this case either.
In your question, there's no need for your input list of circles to be modified. The problem you have is that you're building up a shared list of circle groups. Basically you're sharing your result space and need locks to ensure the integrity of the results.
One technique in this situation is to "partition and merge". As a trivial example consider finding the maximum of a large list of numbers. The naive (and ideal single-threaded solution) is to:
keep a single "current maximum" found;
compare each element to this value;
and update the "current maximum" if it's higher.
The problem for multithreading occurs in updating of the shared result. One solution is to:
partition the list for each of p threads;
find the maximum within each partition;
once all threads finish their work, the final result is trivially obtained by finding the maximum of the p partitioned maximums.
The trade-off against a single-threaded solution involves weighing up the ease with which the workload can be partitioned and the per-thread results merged versus the often much simpler single-threaded approach.
Applying partition and merge to circle clusters
As a side note: Observe that your question is essentially a graph theory question such that: Each circle is a node; where if any 2 circles intersect, there's an undirected edge between them; and you're trying to determine the connected components of the graph.
Obviously this provides an area that you can research for more ideas/information. But more importantly it makes easier to analyse the problem with simple boolean assessment of whether 2 circles intersect.
Also note the potential performance improvements by first pre-processing your circles into a suitable graph structure.
Assume you have 8 circles (A-H) where 1's in the table below indicate the 2 circles intersect.
ABCDEFGH
A11000110
B11000000
C00100000
D00010101
E00001110
F10011100
G10001010
H00010001
One partitioning idea involves determining what's connected by only considering a subset of circles and all their immediate connections.
ABCDEFGH
A11000110 p1 [AB]
B11000000
---------
C00100000 p2 [CD]
D00010101
---------
E00001110 p3 [EF]
F10011100
---------
G10001010 p4 [GH]
H00010001
NB Even though threads are sharing data (e.g. 2 threads may consider the intersection between circles A and F concurrently), the share is read-only and doesn't require a lock.
Assume 4 partitions (and 4 threads) of [AB][CD][EF][GH]. Connected components per partition would be broken down as follows:
[AB]: ABFG
[CD]: C DFH
[EF]: ADEFG
[GH]: AEG DH
You now have a list of potentially overlapping connected components. Merging involves iterating the list to find overlaps. If found, take union of the 2 sets is a new connected component. This will finally produce: ABFGDHE and C
Some optimisation techniques to consider:
The bottom left of the matrix mirrors the top-right. So you should be able to avoid duplicating processing of the inverse connections.
The merging of partitions can itself be partitioned and merged.
In fact in the extreme case you could start out partitioning a single circle per partition.
Connected(A) = ABFG
Connected(B) = B
Connected(AB) = ABFG
Connected(C) = C
Connected(D) = DFH
Connected(CD) = C,DFH
Connected(ABCD) = ABFGDH,C
Connected(E) = EFG
Connected(F) = F
Connected(EF) = EFG
Connected(G) = G
Connected(H) = H
Connected(GH) = G,H
Connected(EFGH) = EFG,H
Connected(ABCDEFGH) = ABFGDHE,C
Very NB You need to ensure appropriate selection of data structures and algorithms or suffer extremely poor performance. E.g. A naive intersection implementation might require O(n^2) operations to determine if two intermediate connected components intersect and totally destroy your goal that lead to all this additional complexity.
One approach is to divide the image into blocks, run the algorithm for each block independently, on different threads (i.e. considering only the circles whose center is in that block), and afterwards join the groups from different blocks that have intersecting circles.
Another approach is to formulate the problem using a graph, where the nodes represent circles, and an edge exists between two nodes if the corresponding circles are intersecting. We need to find the connected components of this graph. This disregards the geometric aspects of the problem, however, there are general algorithms which may be useful (e.g. you could consider the last slides from this link).
How can I optimize a brute force method to find optimal solution for UFL problem? My solution is working very slowly.
If you already know the UFL problem, you can just jump the following description.
There is a graph G. We can divide G's vertices in 2 subsets C and F.
C is the subset of clients and F the subset of facilities.
Every client has a distance to every facility, that is, dij is the distance from client i to facility j.
Every facility i has a cost fi to open
Every client i needs ci objects (from some facility)
Every client i must be served by only one facility j, at the price of (dij * ci)
We want to minimize the overall cost (to serve all clients and open the necessary facilities)
My solution is as simple as possible: test all possibilities of associating clients and facilities, and this is very bad, given that, for example, if I had 10 clients and 5 facilities, there would be 5^10 possibilities.
How can I optimize this? I thought about some preprocessings but I got confused with it because of the fi and I still didn't come up with anything.
Y
I have 6 parameters for which I know maxi and mini values. I have a complex function that includes the 6 parameters and return a 7th value (say Y). I say complex because Y is not directly related to the 6 parameters; there are many embeded functions in between.
I would like to find the combination of the 6 parameters which returns the highest Y value. I first tried to calculate Y for every combination by constructing an hypercube but I have not enough memory in my computer. So I am looking for kinds of markov chains which progress in the delimited parameter space, and are able to overpass local peaks.
when I give one combination of the 6 parameters, I would like to know the highest local Y value. I tried to write a code with an iterative chain like a markov's one, but I am not sure how to process when the chain reach an edge of the parameter space. Obviously, some algorythms should already exist for this.
Question: Does anybody know what are the best functions in R to do these two things? I read that optim() could be appropriate to find the global peak but I am not sure that it can deal with complex functions (I prefer asking before engaging in a long (for me) process of code writing). And fot he local peaks? optim() should not be able to do this
In advance, thank you for any lead
Julien from France
Take a look at the Optimization and Mathematical Programming Task View on CRAN. I've personally found the differential evolution algorithm to be very fast and robust. It's implemented in the DEoptim package. The rgenoud package is another good candidate.
I like to use the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Since you are limiting each parameter to a range, the simple thing to do is let your proposal distribution simply be uniform over the range. That way, you won't run off the edges. It won't be fast, but if you let it run long enough, it will do a good job of sampling your space. The samples will congregate at each peak, and will spread out around them in a way that reflects the local curvature.