Stacking and dynamic programing - dynamic-programming

Question

Basically I'm trying to solve this problem :
Given N unit cube blocks, find the smaller number of piles to make in order to use all the blocks. A pile is either a cube or a pyramid. For example two valid piles are the cube 4 *4 *4=64 using 64 blocks, and the pyramid 1²+2²+3²+4²=30 using 30 blocks.
However, I can't find the right angle to approach it. I feel like it's similar to the knapsack problem, but yet, couldn't find an implementation.
Any help would be much appreciated !

Answer 1

First I will give a recurrence relation which will permit to solve the problem recursively. Given N, let
SQUARE-NUMS
TRIANGLE-NUMS
be the subset of square numbers and triangle numbers in {1,...,N} respectively. Let PERMITTED_SIZES be the union of these. Note that, as 1 occurs in PERMITTED_SIZES, any instance is feasible and yields a nonnegative optimum.
The follwing function in pseudocode will solve the problem in the question recursively.
int MinimumNumberOfPiles(int N)
{
int Result = 1 + min { MinimumNumberOfPiles(N-i) }
where i in PERMITTED_SIZES and i smaller than N;
return Result;
}
The idea is to choose a permitted bin size for the items, remove these items (which makes the problem instance smaller) and solve recursively for the smaller instances. To use dynamic programming in order to circumvent multiple evaluation of the same subproblem, one would use a one-dimensional state space, namely an array A[N] where A[i] is the minimum number of piles needed for i unit blocks. Using this state space, the problem can be solved iteratively as follows.
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
{
if i is 0 set A[i] to 0,
if i occurs in PERMITTED_SIZES, set A[i] to 1,
set A[i] to positive infinity otherwise;
}
This initializes the states which are known beforehand and correspond to the base cases in the above recursion. Next, the missing states are filled using the following loop.
for (int i = 0; i <= N; i++)
{
if (A[i] is positive infinity)
{
A[i] = 1 + min { A[i-j] : j is in PERMITTED_SIZES and j is smaller than i }
}
}
The desired optimal value will be found in A[N]. Note that this algorithm only calculates the minimum number of piles, but not the piles themselves; if a suitable partition is needed, it has to be found either by backtracking or by maintaining additional auxiliary data structures.
In total, provided that PERMITTED_SIZES is known, the problem can be solved in O(N^2) steps, as PERMITTED_SIZES contains at most N values.
The problem can be seen as an adaptation of the Rod Cutting Problem where each square or triangle size has value 0 and every other size has value 1, and the objective is to minimize the total value.
In total, an additional computation cost is necessary to generate PERMITTED_SIZES from the input.
More precisely, the corresponding choice of piles, once A is filled, can be generated using backtracking as follows.
int i = N; // i is the total amount still to be distributed
while ( i > 0 )
{
choose j such that
j is in PERMITTED_SIZES and j is smaller than i
and
A[i] = 1 + A[i-j] is minimized
Output "Take a set of size" + j; // or just output j, which is the set size
// the part above can be commented as "let's find out how
// the value in A[i] was generated"
set i = i-j; // decrease amount to distribute
}