I'm developing an optimization problem that is a variant on Traveling Salesman. In this case, you don't have to visit all the cities, there's a required start and end point, there's a min and max bound on the tour length, you can traverse each arc multiple times if you want, and you have a nonlinear objective function that is associated with the arcs traversed (and number of times you traverse each arc). Decision variables are integers, how many times you traverse each arc.
I've developed a nonlinear integer program in Pyomo and am getting results from the NEOS server. However I didn't put in subtour constraints and my results are two disconnected subtours.
I can find integer programming formulations of TSP that say how to formulate subtour constraints, but this is a little different from the standard TSP and I'm trying to figure out how to start. Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: problem formulation
50 arcs , not exhaustive pairs between nodes. 50 Decision variables N_ab are integer >=0, corresponds to how many times you traverse from a to b. There is a length and profit associated with each N_ab . There are two constraints that the sum of length_ab * N_ab for all ab are between a min and max distance. I have a constraint that the sum of N_ab into each node is equal to the sum N_ab out of the node you can either not visit a node at all, or visit it multiple times. Objective function is nonlinear and related to the interaction between pairs of arcs (not relevant for subtour).
Subtours: looking at math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/methods/opt/subtour.htm , the formulation isn't applicable since I am not required to visit all cities, and may not be able to. So for example, let's say I have 20 nodes and 50 arcs (all arcs length 10). Distance constraints are for a tour of exactly length 30, which means I can visit at most three nodes (start at A -> B -> C ->A = length 30). So I will not visit the other nodes at all. TSP subtour elimination would require that I have edges from node subgroup ABC to subgroup of nonvisited nodes - which isn't needed for my problem
Here is an approach that is adapted from the prize-collecting TSP (e.g., this paper). Let V be the set of all nodes. I am assuming V includes a depot node, call it node 1, that must be on the tour. (If not, you can probably add a dummy node that serves this role.)
Let x[i] be a decision variable that equals 1 if we visit node i at least once, and 0 otherwise. (You might already have such a decision variable in your model.)
Add these constraints, which define x[i]:
x[i] <= sum {j in V} N[i,j] for all i in V
M * x[i] >= N[i,j] for all i, j in V
In other words: x[i] cannot equal 1 if there are no edges coming out of node i, and x[i] must equal 1 if there are any edges coming out of node i.
(Here, N[i,j] is 1 if we go from i to j, and M is a sufficiently large number, perhaps equal to the maximum number of times you can traverse one edge.)
Here is the subtour-elimination constraint, defined for all subsets S of V such that S includes node 1, and for all nodes i in V \ S:
sum {j in S} (N[i,j] + N[j,i]) >= 2 * x[i]
In other words, if we visit node i, which is not in S, then there must be at least two edges into or out of S. (A subtour would violate this constraint for S equal to the nodes that are on the subtour that contains 1.)
We also need a constraint requiring node 1 to be on the tour:
x[1] = 1
I might be playing a little fast and loose with the directional indices, i.e., I'm not sure if your model sets N[i,j] = N[j,i] or something like that, but hopefully the idea is clear enough and you can modify my approach as necessary.
Related
Say I have a graph with several nodes. I need to design an algorithm which randomly creates directed edges between nodes while satisfying the following conditions:
each node has exactly one edge pointing to it
each node has exactly one edge pointing away from it
no node points to itself
For example, say my graph had three nodes, the following scenarios would be acceptable:
Node A points to B, B points to C, C points to A
Node A points to C, C points to B, B points to A
Does anyone know what the most efficient way of doing this would be? I'm using nodejs btw. For argument's sake, we can say that I am starting with an array containing the names of the nodes.
Thanks
lets define you have array of vertex: V = {v}; |V| = N, now we can shuffle array of vertex by using any random shuffle algorithm.
V = [v_1, v_2, v_3,..,v_n]
Now we can define N-1 edges E, where e[i] = (v[i] to v[i + 1]), and the last vertex will be (v[N-1] to v[0])
total number of ways to reach the nth floor with following types of moves:
Type 1 in a single move you can move from i to i+1 floor – you can use the this move any number of times
Type 2 in a single move you can move from i to i+2 floor – you can use this move any number of times
Type 3 in a single move you can move from i to i+3 floor – but you can use this move at most k times
i know how to reach nth floor by following step 1 ,step 2, step 3 any number of times using dp like dp[i]=dp[i-1]+dp[i-2]+dp[i-3].i am stucking in the condition of Type 3 movement with atmost k times.
someone tell me the approach here.
While modeling any recursion or dynamic programming problem, it is important to identify the goal, constraints, states, state function, state transitions, possible state variables and initial condition aka base state. Using this information we should try to come up with a recurrence relation.
In our current problem:
Goal: Our goal here is to somehow calculate number of ways to reach floor n while beginning from floor 0.
Constraints: We can move from floor i to i+3 at most K times. We name it as a special move. So, one can perform this special move at most K times.
State: In this problem, our situation of being at a floor could be one way to model a state. The exact situation can be defined by the state variables.
State variables: State variables are properties of the state and are important to identify a state uniquely. Being at a floor i alone is not enough in itself as we also have a constraint K. So to identify a state uniquely we want to have 2 state variables: i indicating floor ranging between 0..n and k indicating number of special move used out of K (capital K).
State functions: In our current problem, we are concerned with finding number of ways to reach a floor i from floor 0. We only need to define one function number_of_ways associated with corresponding state to describe the problem. Depending on problem, we may need to define more state functions.
State Transitions: Here we identify how can we transition between states. We can come freely to floor i from floor i-1 and floor i-2 without consuming our special move. We can only come to floor i from floor i-3 while consuming a special move, if i >=3 and special moves used so far k < K.
In other words, possible state transitions are:
state[i,k] <== state[i-1,k] // doesn't consume special move k
state[i,k] <== state[i-2,k] // doesn't consume special move k
state[i,k+1] <== state[i-3, k] if only k < K and i >= 3
We should now be able to form following recurrence relation using above information. While coming up with a recurrence relation, we must ensure that all the previous states needed for computation of current state are computed first. We can ensure the order by computing our states in the topological order of directed acyclic graph (DAG) formed by defined states as its vertices and possible transitions as directed edges. It is important to note that it is only possible to have such ordering if the directed graph formed by defined states is acyclic, otherwise we need to rethink if the states are correctly defined uniquely by its state variables.
Recurrence Relation:
number_of_ways[i,k] = ((number_of_ways[i-1,k] if i >= 1 else 0)+
(number_of_ways[i-2,k] if i >= 2 else 0) +
(number_of_ways[i-3,k-1] if i >= 3 and k < K else 0)
)
Base cases:
Base cases or solutions to initial states kickstart our recurrence relation and are sufficient to compute solutions of remaining states. These are usually trivial cases or smallest subproblems that can be solved without recurrence relation.
We can have as many base conditions as we require and there is no specific limit. Ideally we would want to have a minimal set of base conditions, enough to compute solutions of all remaining states. For the current problem, after initializing all not computed solutions so far as 0,
number_of_ways[0, 0] = 1
number_of_ways[0,k] = 0 where 0 < k <= K
Our required final answer will be sum(number_of_ways[n,k], for all 0<=k<=K).
You can use two-dimensional dynamic programming:
dp[i,j] is the solution value when exactly j Type-3 steps are used. Then
dp[i,j]=dp[i-1,j]+dp[i-2,j]+dp[i-3,j-1], and the initial values are dp[0,0]=0, dp[1,0]=1, and dp[3*m,m]=m for m<=k. You can build up first the d[i,0] values, then the d[i,1] values, etc. Or you can do a different order, as long as all necessary values are already computed.
Following #LaszloLadanyi approach ,below is the code snippet in python
def solve(self, n, k):
dp=[[0 for i in range(k+1)]for _ in range(n+1)]
dp[0][0]=1
for j in range(k+1):
for i in range(1,n+1):
dp[i][j]+=dp[i-1][j]
if i>1:
dp[i][j]+=dp[i-2][j]
if i>2 and j>0:
dp[i][j]+=dp[i-3][j-1]
return sum(dp[n])
I am dealing with a problem which is a variant of a subset-sum problem, and I am hoping that the additional constraint could make it easier to solve than the classical subset-sum problem. I have searched for a problem with this constraint but I have been unable to find a good example with an appropriate algorithm either on StackOverflow or through googling elsewhere.
The problem:
Assume you have two lists of positive numbers A1,A2,A3... and B1,B2,B3... with the same number of elements N. There are two sums Sa and Sb. The problem is to find the simultaneous set Q where |sum (A{Q}) - Sa| <= epsilon and |sum (B{Q}) - Sb| <= epsilon. So, if Q is {1, 5, 7} then A1 + A5 + A7 - Sa <= epsilon and B1 + B5 + B7 - Sb <= epsilon. Epsilon is an arbitrarily small positive constant.
Now, I could solve this as two completely separate subset sum problems, but removing the simultaneity constraint results in the possibility of erroneous solutions (where Qa != Qb). I also suspect that the additional constraint should make this problem easier than the two NP complete problems. I would like to solve an instance with 18+ elements in both lists of numbers, and most subset-sum algorithms have a long run time with this number of elements. I have investigated the pseudo-polynomial run time dynamic programming algorithm, but this has the problems that a) the speed relies on a short bit-depth of the list of numbers (which does not necessarily apply to my instance) and b) it does not take into account the simultaneity constraint.
Any advice on how to use the simultaneity constraint to reduce the run time? Is there a dynamic programming approach I could use to take into account this constraint?
If I understand your description of the problem correctly (I'm confused about why you have the distance symbols around "sum (A{Q}) - Sa" and "sum (B{Q}) - Sb", it doesn't seem to fit the rest of the explanation), then it is in NP.
You can see this by making a reduction from Subset sum (SUB) to Simultaneous subset sum (SIMSUB).
If you have a SUB problem consisting of a set X = {x1,x2,...,xn} and a target called t and you have an algorithm that solves SIMSUB when given two sets A = {a1,a2,...,an} and B = {b1,b2,...,bn}, two intergers Sa and Sb and a value for epsilon then we can solve SUB like this:
Let A = X and let B be a set of length n consisting of only 0's. Set Sa = t, Sb = 0 and epsilon = 0. You can now run the SIMSUB algorithm on this problem and get the solution to your SUB problem.
This shows that SUBSIM is as least as hard as SUB and therefore in NP.
I was recently reading an article on string hashing. We can hash a string by converting a string into a polynomial.
H(s1s2s3 ...sn) = (s1 + s2*p + s3*(p^2) + ··· + sn*(p^n−1)) mod M.
What are the constraints on p and M so that the probability of collision decreases?
A good requirement for a hash function on strings is that it should be difficult to find a
pair of different strings, preferably of the same length n, that have equal fingerprints. This
excludes the choice of M < n. Indeed, in this case at some point the powers of p corresponding
to respective symbols of the string start to repeat.
Similarly, if gcd(M, p) > 1 then powers of p modulo M may repeat for
exponents smaller than n. The safest choice is to set p as one of
the generators of the group U(ZM) – the group of all integers
relatively prime to M under multiplication modulo M.
I am not able to understand the above constraints. How selecting M < n and gcd(M,p) > 1 increases collision? Can somebody explain these two with some examples? I just need a basic understanding of these.
In addition, if anyone can focus on upper and lower bounds of M, it will be more than enough.
The above facts has been taken from the following article string hashing mit.
The "correct" answers to these questions involve some amount of number theory, but it can often be instructive to look at some extreme cases to see why the constraints might be useful.
For example, let's look at why we want M ≥ n. As an extreme case, let's pick M = 2 and n = 4. Then look at the numbers p0 mod 2, p1 mod 2, p2 mod 2, and p3 mod 2. Because there are four numbers here and only two possible remainders, by the pigeonhole principle we know that at least two of these numbers must be equal. Let's assume, for simplicity, that p0 and p1 are the same. This means that the hash function will return the same hash code for any two strings whose first two characters have been swapped, since those characters are multiplied by the same amount, which isn't a desirable property of a hash function. More generally, the reason why we want M ≥ n is so that the values p0, p1, ..., pn-1 at least have the possibility of being distinct. If M < n, there will just be too many powers of p for them to all be unique.
Now, let's think about why we want gcd(M, p) = 1. As an extreme case, suppose we pick p such that gcd(M, p) = M (that is, we pick p = M). Then
s0p0 + s1p1 + s2p2 + ... + sn-1pn-1 (mod M)
= s0M0 + s1M1 + s2M2 + ... + sn-1Mn-1 (mod M)
= s0
Oops, that's no good - that makes our hash code exactly equal to the first character of the string. This means that if p isn't coprime with M (that is, if gcd(M, p) ≠ 1), you run the risk of certain characters being "modded out" of the hash code, increasing the collision probability.
How selecting M < n and gcd(M,p) > 1 increases collision?
In your hash function formula, M might reasonably be used to restrict the hash result to a specific bit-width: e.g. M=216 for a 16-bit hash, M=232 for a 32-bit hash, M=2^64 for a 64-bit hash. Usually, a mod/% operation is not actually needed in an implementation, as using the desired size of unsigned integer for the hash calculation inherently performs that function.
I don't recommend it, but sometimes you do see people describing hash functions that are so exclusively coupled to the size of a specific hash table that they mod the results directly to the table size.
The text you quote from says:
A good requirement for a hash function on strings is that it should be difficult to find a pair of different strings, preferably of the same length n, that have equal fingerprints. This excludes the choice of M < n.
This seems a little silly in three separate regards. Firstly, it implies that hashing a long passage of text requires a massively long hash value, when practically it's the number of distinct passages of text you need to hash that's best considered when selecting M.
More specifically, if you have V distinct values to hash with a good general purpose hash function, you'll get dramatically less collisions of the hash values if your hash function produces at least V2 distinct hash values. For example, if you are hashing 1000 values (~210), you want M to be at least 1 million (i.e. at least 2*10 = 20-bit hash values, which is fine to round up to 32-bit but ideally don't settle for 16-bit). Read up on the Birthday Problem for related insights.
Secondly, given n is the number of characters, the number of potential values (i.e. distinct inputs) is the number of distinct values any specific character can take, raised to the power n. The former is likely somewhere from 26 to 256 values, depending on whether the hash supports only letters, or say alphanumeric input, or standard- vs. extended-ASCII and control characters etc., or even more for Unicode. The way "excludes the choice of M < n" implies any relevant linear relationship between M and n is bogus; if anything, it's as M drops below the number of distinct potential input values that it increasingly promotes collisions, but again it's the actual number of distinct inputs that tends to matter much, much more.
Thirdly, "preferably of the same length n" - why's that important? As far as I can see, it's not.
I've nothing to add to templatetypedef's discussion on gcd.
I was looking through a programming question, when the following question suddenly seemed related.
How do you convert a string to another string using as few swaps as follows. The strings are guaranteed to be interconvertible (they have the same set of characters, this is given), but the characters can be repeated. I saw web results on the same question, without the characters being repeated though.
Any two characters in the string can be swapped.
For instance : "aabbccdd" can be converted to "ddbbccaa" in two swaps, and "abcc" can be converted to "accb" in one swap.
Thanks!
This is an expanded and corrected version of Subhasis's answer.
Formally, the problem is, given a n-letter alphabet V and two m-letter words, x and y, for which there exists a permutation p such that p(x) = y, determine the least number of swaps (permutations that fix all but two elements) whose composition q satisfies q(x) = y. Assuming that n-letter words are maps from the set {1, ..., m} to V and that p and q are permutations on {1, ..., m}, the action p(x) is defined as the composition p followed by x.
The least number of swaps whose composition is p can be expressed in terms of the cycle decomposition of p. When j1, ..., jk are pairwise distinct in {1, ..., m}, the cycle (j1 ... jk) is a permutation that maps ji to ji + 1 for i in {1, ..., k - 1}, maps jk to j1, and maps every other element to itself. The permutation p is the composition of every distinct cycle (j p(j) p(p(j)) ... j'), where j is arbitrary and p(j') = j. The order of composition does not matter, since each element appears in exactly one of the composed cycles. A k-element cycle (j1 ... jk) can be written as the product (j1 jk) (j1 jk - 1) ... (j1 j2) of k - 1 cycles. In general, every permutation can be written as a composition of m swaps minus the number of cycles comprising its cycle decomposition. A straightforward induction proof shows that this is optimal.
Now we get to the heart of Subhasis's answer. Instances of the asker's problem correspond one-to-one with Eulerian (for every vertex, in-degree equals out-degree) digraphs G with vertices V and m arcs labeled 1, ..., m. For j in {1, ..., n}, the arc labeled j goes from y(j) to x(j). The problem in terms of G is to determine how many parts a partition of the arcs of G into directed cycles can have. (Since G is Eulerian, such a partition always exists.) This is because the permutations q such that q(x) = y are in one-to-one correspondence with the partitions, as follows. For each cycle (j1 ... jk) of q, there is a part whose directed cycle is comprised of the arcs labeled j1, ..., jk.
The problem with Subhasis's NP-hardness reduction is that arc-disjoint cycle packing on Eulerian digraphs is a special case of arc-disjoint cycle packing on general digraphs, so an NP-hardness result for the latter has no direct implications for the complexity status of the former. In very recent work (see the citation below), however, it has been shown that, indeed, even the Eulerian special case is NP-hard. Thus, by the correspondence above, the asker's problem is as well.
As Subhasis hints, this problem can be solved in polynomial time when n, the size of the alphabet, is fixed (fixed-parameter tractable). Since there are O(n!) distinguishable cycles when the arcs are unlabeled, we can use dynamic programming on a state space of size O(mn), the number of distinguishable subgraphs. In practice, that might be sufficient for (let's say) a binary alphabet, but if I were to try to try to solve this problem exactly on instances with large alphabets, then I likely would try branch and bound, obtaining bounds by using linear programming with column generation to pack cycles fractionally.
#article{DBLP:journals/corr/GutinJSW14,
author = {Gregory Gutin and
Mark Jones and
Bin Sheng and
Magnus Wahlstr{\"o}m},
title = {Parameterized Directed \$k\$-Chinese Postman Problem and \$k\$
Arc-Disjoint Cycles Problem on Euler Digraphs},
journal = {CoRR},
volume = {abs/1402.2137},
year = {2014},
ee = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2137},
bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}
You can construct the "difference" strings S and S', i.e. a string which contains the characters at the differing positions of the two strings, e.g. for acbacb and abcabc it will be cbcb and bcbc. Let us say this contains n characters.
You can now construct a "permutation graph" G which will have n nodes and an edge from i to j if S[i] == S'[j]. In the case of all unique characters, it is easy to see that the required number of swaps will be (n - number of cycles in G), which can be found out in O(n) time.
However, in the case where there are any number of duplicate characters, this reduces to the problem of finding out the largest number of cycles in a directed graph, which, I think, is NP-hard, (e.g. check out: http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~jverstra/dcig.pdf ).
In that paper a few greedy algorithms are pointed out, one of which is particularly simple:
At each step, find the minimum length cycle in the graph (e.g. Find cycle of shortest length in a directed graph with positive weights )
Delete it
Repeat until all vertexes have not been covered.
However, there may be efficient algorithms utilizing the properties of your case (the only one I can think of is that your graphs will be K-partite, where K is the number of unique characters in S). Good luck!
Edit:
Please refer to David's answer for a fuller and correct explanation of the problem.
Do an A* search (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-star_search_algorithm for an explanation) for the shortest path through the graph of equivalent strings from one string to the other. Use the Levenshtein distance / 2 as your cost heuristic.