How to reduce the time in this program? - c++

Question

I have a program like this: given a sequence of integers, find the biggest prime and its positon.
Example:
input:
9 // how many numbers
19 7 81 33 17 4 19 21 13
output:
19 // the biggest prime
1 7 // and its positon
So first I get the input, store it in an array, make a copy of that array and sort it (because I use a varible to keep track of the higest prime, and insane thing will happen if that was unsorted) work with every number of that array to check if it is prime, loop through it again to have the positon and print the result.
But the time is too slow, can I improve it?
My code:
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <algorithm>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
int n;
cin >> n;
int numbersNotSorted[n];
int maxNum{0};
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
cin >> numbersNotSorted[i];
}
int numbersSorted[n];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
numbersSorted[i] = numbersNotSorted[i];
}
sort(numbersSorted, numbersSorted + n);
for (int number = 0; number < n; number++)
{
int countNum{0};
for (int i = 2; i <= sqrt(numbersSorted[number]); i++)
{
if (numbersSorted[number] % i == 0)
countNum++;
}
if (countNum == 0)
{
maxNum = numbersSorted[number];
}
}
cout << maxNum << '\n';
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
if (numbersNotSorted[i] == maxNum)
cout << i + 1 << ' ';
}
}

Answer 1

If you need the biggest prime, sorting the array brings you no benefit, you'll need to check all the values stored in the array anyway.
Even if you implemented a fast sorting algorithm, the best averages you can hope for are O(N + k), so just sorting the array is actually more costly than looking for the largest prime in an unsorted array.
The process is pretty straight forward, check if the next value is larger than the current largest prime, and if so check if it's also prime, store the positions and/or value if it is, if not, check the next value, repeat until the end of the array.
θ(N) time compexity will be the best optimization possible given the conditions.

Answer 2

Start with a basic "for each number entered" loop:
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <algorithm>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int n;
int newNumber;
cin >> n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
cin >> newNumber;
}
}
If the new number is smaller than the current largest prime, then it can be ignored.
int main() {
int n;
int newNumber;
int highestPrime;
cin >> n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
cin >> newNumber;
if(newNumber >= highestPrime) {
}
}
}
If the new number is equal to the highest prime, then you just need to store its position somewhere. I'm lazy, so:
int main() {
int n;
int newNumber;
int highestPrime;
int maxPositions = 1234;
int positionList[maxPositions];
int nextPosition;
int currentPosition = 0;
cin >> n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
cin >> newNumber;
currentPosition++;
if(newNumber >= highestPrime) {
if(newNumber == highestPrime) {
if(nextPosition+1 >= maxPositions) {
// List of positions is too small (should've used malloc/realloc instead of being lazy)!
} else {
positionList[nextPosition++] = currentPosition;
}
}
}
}
}
If the new number is larger than the current largest prime, then you need to figure out if it is a prime number, and if it is you need to reset the list and store its position, etc:
int main() {
int n;
int newNumber;
int highestPrime = 0;
int maxPositions = 1234;
int positionList[maxPositions];
int nextPosition;
int currentPosition = 0;
cin >> n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
cin >> newNumber;
currentPosition++;
if(newNumber >= highestPrime) {
if(newNumber == highestPrime) {
if(nextPosition+1 >= maxPositions) {
// List of positions is too small (should've used malloc/realloc instead of being lazy)!
} else {
positionList[nextPosition++] = currentPosition;
}
} else { // newNumber > highestPrime
if(isPrime(newNumber)) {
nextPosition = 0; // Reset the list
highestPrime = newNumber;
positionList[nextPosition++] = currentPosition;
}
}
}
}
}
You'll also want something to display the results:
if(highestPrime > 0) {
for(nextPosition= 0; nextPosition < currentPosition; nextPosition++) {
cout << positionList[nextPosition];
}
}
Now; the only thing you're missing is an isPrime(int n) function. The fastest way to do that is to pre-calculate a "is/isn't prime" bitfield. It might look something like:
bool isPrime(int n) {
if(n & 1 != 0) {
n >>= 1;
if( primeNumberBitfield[n / 32] & (1 << (n % 32)) != 0) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
The problem here is that (for positive values in a 32-bit signed integer) you'll need 1 billion bits (or 128 MiB).
To avoid that you can use a much smaller bitfield for numbers up to sqrt(1 << 31) (which is only about 4 KiB); then if the number is too large for the bitfield you can use the bitfield to find prime numbers and check (with modulo) if they divide the original number evenly.
Note that Sieve of Eratosthenes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes ) is an efficient way to generate that smaller bitfield (but is not efficient to use for a sparse population of larger numbers).
If you do it right, you'll probably create the illusion that it's instantaneous because almost all of the work will be done while a human is slowly typing the numbers in (and not left until after all of the numbers have been entered). For a very fast typist you'll have ~2 milliseconds between numbers, and (after the last number is entered) humans can't notice delays smaller than about 10 milliseconds.

Answer 3

But the time is too slow, can I improve it?
Below loop suffers from:
Why check smallest values first? Makes more sense to check largest values first to find the largest prime. Exit the for (... number..) loop early once a prime is found. This takes advantage of the work done by sort().
Once a candidate value is not a prime, quit testing for prime-ness.
.
// (1) Start for other end rather than as below
for (int number = 0; number < n; number++) {
int countNum {0};
for (int i = 2; i <= sqrt(numbersSorted[number]); i++) {
if (numbersSorted[number] % i == 0)
// (2) No point in continuing prime testing, Value is composite.
countNum++;
}
if (countNum == 0) {
maxNum = numbersSorted[number];
}
}
Corrections left for OP to implement.
Advanced: Prime testing is a deep subject and many optimizations (trivial and complex) exist that are better than OP's approach. Yet I suspect the above 2 improvement will suffice for OP.
Brittleness: Code does not well handle the case of no primes in the list or n <= 0.
i <= sqrt(numbersSorted[number]) is prone to FP issues leading to an incorrect results. Recommend i <= numbersSorted[number]/i).
Sorting is O(n * log n). Prime testing, as done here, is O(n * sqrt(n[i])). Sorting does not increase O() of the overall code when the square root of the max value is less than log of n. Sorting is worth doing if the result of the sort is used well.
Code fails if the largest value was 1 as prime test incorrectly identifies 1 as a prime.
Code fails if numbersSorted[number] < 0 due to sqrt().
Simply full-range int prime test:
bool isprime(int num) {
if (num % 2 == 0) return num == 2;
for (int divisor = 3; divisor <= num / divisor; divisor += 2) {
if (num % divisor == 0) return false;
}
return num > 1;
}

Answer 4

If you want to find the prime, don't go for sorting. You'll have to check for all the numbers present in the array then.
You can try this approach to do the same thing, but all within a lesser amount of time:
Step-1: Create a global function for detecting a prime number. Here's how you can approach this-
bool prime(int n)
{
int i, p=1;
for(i=2;i<=sqrt(n);i++) //note that I've iterated till the square root of n, to cut down on the computational time
{
if(n%i==0)
{
p=0;
break;
}
}
if(p==0)
return false;
else
return true;
}
Step-2: Now your main function starts. You take input from the user:
int main()
{
int n, i, MAX;
cout<<"Enter the number of elements: ";
cin>>n;
int arr[n];
cout<<"Enter the array elements: ";
for(i=0;i<n;i++)
cin>>arr[i];
Step-3: Note that I've declared a counter variable MAX. I initialize this variable as the first element of the array: MAX=arr[0];
Step-4: Now the loop for iterating the array. What I did was, I iterated through the array and at each element, I checked if the value is greater than or equal to the previous MAX. This will ensure, that the program does not check the values which are less than MAX, thus eliminating a part of the array and cutting down the time. I then nested another if statement, to check if the value is a prime or not. If both of these are satisfied, I set the value of MAX to the current value of the array:
for(i=0;i<n;i++)
{
if(arr[i]>=MAX) //this will check if the number is greater than the previous MAX number or not
{
if(prime(arr[i])) //if the previous condition satisfies, then only this block of code will run and check if it's a prime or not
MAX=arr[i];
}
}
What happens is this- The value of MAX changes to the max prime number of the array after every single loop.
Step-5: Then, after finally traversing the array, when the program finally comes out of the loop, MAX will have the largest prime number of the array stored in it. Print this value of MAX. Now for getting the positions where MAX happens, just iterate over the whole loop and check for the values that match MAX and print their positions:
for(i=0;i<n;i++)
{
if(arr[i]==MAX)
cout<<i+1<<" ";
}
I ran this code in Dev C++ 5.11 and the compilation time was 0.72s.