Force a minimum number of instances - alloy

When running a model in alloy, you can define a maximum number of objects.
// like this:
run example for 10 MyElements
If you want exactly 10, you can write:
run example for exactly 10 MyElements
But is there a way to force a minimum amount instead of a maximum ?
Or something like an interval ? This would make testing much easier.

You could use cardinality constraints to force that. Something like
run {example and #MyElements>5} for 10 MyElements, 5 int
You need to be careful to set the integer bit-width to allow enough positive
integers up to your scope.

Related

Can IF statements be used to calculate the most efficent way of ordering items

I have been trying to update a spreadsheet we currently using to show the most efficient way of ordering items. Items can be ordered in packs of 1, 5, 10 or 20. Can if statements be used to produce a table to show the best way of ordering these?
E.G: 18 - made of 1 x pack of 10; 1 x pack of 5; 3 x pack of 1
Been trying to use IF statements, but as the numbers get larger: more errors seems to creep in. I'm certain there is a simple solution i am missing at the moment.
Packaging
You can handle this easily with INT and MOD.
=INT($A3/B$2)
=INT(MOD($A3,B$2)/C$2)
It was easy when the packaging was convenient. If it isn't, instead of MOD, you could use SUMPRODUCT.
=INT($A3/B$2)
=INT(($A3-SUMPRODUCT($B$2:B$2,$B3:B3))/C$2)
A quick go at this, but I added some prices:
But you may want to consider how you could get the result of ordering 20 and having 2 spare etc...
So, set that up like this, but you nay want to fine tune to control your situation more precisely:

How long does it take to crack a hash?

I want to calculate the time it will take to break a SHA-256 hash. So I research and found the following calculation. If I have a password in lower letter with a length of 6 chars, I would have 26^6passwords right?
To calculate the time I have to divide this number by a hashrate, I guess. So if I had one RTX 3090, the hashrate would be 120 MH/s (1.2*10^8 H/s) and than I need to calculate 26^6/(1.2*10^8) to get the time in seconds right?
Is this idea right or wrong?
Yes, but a lowercase-latin 6 character string is also short enough that you would expect to compute this one time and put it into a database so that you could look it up in O(1). It's only a bit over 300M entries. That said, given you're 50% likely to find the answer in the first half of your search, it's so fast to crack that you might not even bother unless you were doing this often. You don't even need a particularly fancy GPU for something on this scale.
Note that in many cases a 6 character string can also be a 5 character string, so you need to add 26^6 + 26^5 + 26^4 + ..., but all of these together only raises this to around 320M hashes. It's a tiny space.
Adding uppercase, numbers and the easily typed symbols gets you up to 96^6 ~ 780B. On the other hand, adding just 3 more lowercase-letters (9 total) gets you to 26^9 ~ 5.4T. For brute force on random strings, longer is much more powerful than complicated.
To your specific question, note that it does matter how you implement this. You won't get these kinds of hash rates if you don't write your code in a way to maximize the GPU. For example, writing simple code that sends one value to the GPU to hash at a time, and then compares the result on the CPU could be incredibly slow (in some cases slower than just doing all the work on a CPU). Setting up your memory efficiently and maximizing things the GPU can do in parallel are very important. If you're not familiar with this kind of programming, I recommend using or studying a tool like John the Ripper.

Any algorithm that use a number as a feed for generating random string?

I want to generate a random string with any fixed length (N) of my choice. With the same number as a feed to this algorithm it should generate the same string. And with small change to the number like number+1, it should generate a completely different string. (Difficult to relate to the previous seed) It's ok if more than one number might result in the same string. Any approaches for doing this?
By the way, I have a set of characters that I want to appear in the string, like A-Z a-z 0-9.
For example
Algorithm(54893450,4,"ABCDEFG0") -> A0GF
Algorithm(54893451,4,"ABCDEFG0") -> BDCG
I could random each characters one by one, but it would need N different seed for each characters. If I want to do it this way, the question might become "how to generate N numbers from one number" for the seeds.
The end goal is that I want to convert a GUID to something more readable on printed media and shorter. I don't care about conflict. (If the conflict did happen, I can still check the GUID for resolution)
Ok, thanks for the guidance #Jim Mischel. I read all the related pages and come to understand more about this.
http://blog.mischel.com/2017/05/30/how-not-to-generate-unique-codes/
http://blog.mischel.com/2017/06/02/a-broken-unique-key-generator/
http://blog.mischel.com/2017/06/10/how-did-this-happen/
http://blog.mischel.com/2017/06/20/how-to-generate-random-looking-keys/
https://ericlippert.com/2013/11/12/math-from-scratch-part-thirteen-multiplicative-inverses/
https://ericlippert.com/2013/11/14/a-practical-use-of-multiplicative-inverses/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Euclidean_algorithm
In short, first I should use a sequential number. That is 1,2,3,4,... Very predictable, but it can turn into something random and hard to guess.
(Note that in my case this is not entirely possible, since each users will be generating his own ID locally so I cannot run a global sequential number, hence I use GUID. But I will make my own workaround to fit GUID to this solution, probably with a simple modulo on the GUID to fit it to my desired range.)
With sequential integer n I can get another seemingly unrelated integer with a multiplication then a modulo. This might looks like (n * x)% m with x and m of my choice. Of course m would have to be larger than the largest number that I want to use since it wraps around the modulo while multiplying.
This alone is a good start as close number n does not provide similar output. But we cannot be so sure about that. For example, if my x is 4 and m is 16 then the input can only produce 0,4,8,12. To avoid this we choose x and m which is a coprime of each other. (Having greatest common divisor of 1) There are many obvious candidate to this such as 100000 as m (defines the limit of my output as 99999) and 2429 as x. If we choose 2 coprime like this, not only the result conflict as less as possible, it also guarantee that each input produces unique output in that range.
We can learn from this example :
(n * 5) % 16
As 5 and 16 is a coprime, we can get a maximum length of sequence of unique numbers before it wraps around. (length = 16) if we input numbers sequentially from 0 to 16 :
Input : 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16
Output : 0, 5, 10, 15, 4, 9, 14, 3, 8, 13, 2, 7, 12, 1, 6, 11, 0
We can see that the output is in a not so predictable sequence and also none of the output other than the last one is the same. It travels to all available number possible.
Now my very predictable sequential running number would produce sufficiently different number and also guarantee not to conflict to any other input as long as it is in the range of m. What's left is to convert this number to a string of my choice via base conversion. If I have 5 characters "ABCDE" then I will use base-5.
Only this is enough for my use case. But with the concept of multiplicative inverse I can also find one more integer y which can reverse that multiply modulo transformation to the original number. Currently I still haven't understand that part fully, but it uses Extended Euclidean Algorithm to find y.
Since my application does not need reverting yet I am fine with not understanding it for now. I will definitely try to understand that part.

generating many random numbers in bit of time

I am using C++ 2012. I want to use a rand() in program that must generate random values many times (100 random number for 3000 iteration) and all of these process should be done in a second or even fewer. How can i do this. I know that "srand((unsigned int)time(NULL));" must be used as a seed for rand(). But What about these tiny bit of time while the second in time() may be the same in all 3000 iteration. I know there exist "random.h" but I am a beginner and do not know how to use it.
please help.
Only seed your random number generator once.
srand() is used to seed the C library's random number generator (rand()). You absolutely do not want to call srand repeatedly, otherwise you ruin the psuedo-random properties of the RNG.
Recommended way to initialize srand?
srand() — why call it only once?

hashmap remove complexity

So a lot of sources say the hashmap remove function is O(1), but I don't see how this could be unless a hashmap were backed by a linkedlist because list removals are O(n). Could someone explain?
You can view a Hasmap as an array. Imagine, you want to store objects of all humans on earth somewhere. You could just get an unique number for everyone and use an array with a dimension of 10*10^20.
If someone is born, she/he gets the next free number and is added to the end. If someone dies, her/his number is used and the array entry is set to null.
You can easily see, to add some or to remove someone, you need only constant time. calculate array address, done (if you have random access memory).
What is added by the Hashmap? There are 2 motivations. On the one side, you do not want to have such a big array. If you only want to store 10 people from all over the world, nearly all entries of the array are free. On the other side, not all data you want to store somewhere have an unique number. Sometimes there are multiple times the same number, some numbers do now show overall and sometimes you do not have any number. Therefore, you define a function, which uses the big numbers from the input and reduce them to numbers in a smaller range. This reduction should be in a way, that the resulting number is most likely unique for different inputs.
Example: Lets say you want to store 10 numbers from 1 to 100000000. You could use an array with 100000000 indices. Or you could use an array with 100 indices and the function f(x) = x % 100. If you have the number 1234, f(1234) = 34. Mark 34 as assigned.
Now you could ask, what happens if you have the number 2234? We have a collision then. You need some strategy then to handle this, there are several. Study some literature or ask specific questions for this.
If you want to store a string, you could imagine to use the length or the sum of the ascii value from every characters.
As you see, we can easily store something, and easily access it again. What we have to do? Calculate the hash from the function (constant time for a good function), access the array (constant time), store or remove (constant time).
In real world, a good hash function is not that easy. Try to stick with the included ones in java.
If you want to read more details, the wikipedia article about hash table is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table
I don't think the remove(key) complexity is O(1). If we have a big hash table with many collisions, then it would be O(n) in worst case. It very rare to get the worst case but we can't neglect the fact that O(1) is not guaranteed.
If your HashMap is backed by a LinkedList buckets array
The worst case of the remove function will be O(n)
If your HashMap is backed by a Balanced Binary Tree buckets array
The worst case of the remove function will be O(log n)
The best case and the average case (amortized complexity) of the remove function is O(1)

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