Fastest way to find the sum of decimal digits - c++

Question

What is the fastest way to find the sum of decimal digits?
The following code is what I wrote but it is very very slow for range 1 to 1000000000000000000
long long sum_of_digits(long long input) {
long long total = 0;
while (input != 0) {
total += input % 10;
input /= 10;
}
return total;
}
int main ( int argc, char** argv) {
for ( long long i = 1L; i <= 1000000000000000000L; i++) {
sum_of_digits(i);
}
return 0;
}

Answer 1

I'm assuming what you are trying to do is along the lines of
#include <iostream>
const long long limit = 1000000000000000000LL;
int main () {
long long grand_total = 0;
for (long long ii = 1; ii <= limit; ++ii) {
grand_total += sum_of_digits(i);
}
std::cout << "Grand total = " << grand_total << "\n";
return 0;
}
This won't work for two reasons:
It will take a long long time.
It will overflow.
To deal with the overflow problem, you will either have to put a bound on your upper limit or use some bignum package. I'll leave solving that problem up to you.
To deal with the computational burden you need to get creative. If you know the upper limit is limited to powers of 10 this is fairly easy. If the upper limit can be some arbitrary number you will have to get a bit more creative.
First look at the problem of computing the sum of digits of all integers from 0 to 10n-1 (e.g., 0 to 9 (n=1), 0 to 99 (n=2), etc.) Denote the sum of digits of all integers from 10n-1 as Sn. For n=1 (0 to 9), this is just 0+1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9=45 (9*10/2). Thus S1=45.
For n=2 (0 to 99), you are summing 0-9 ten times and you are summing 0-9 ten times again. For n=3 (0 to 999), you are summing 0-99 ten times and you are summing 0-9 100 times. For n=4 (0 to 9999), you are summing 0-999 ten times and you are summing 0-9 1000 times. In general, Sn=10Sn-1+10n-1S1 as a recursive expression. This simplifies to Sn=(9n10n)/2.
If the upper limit is of the form 10n, the solution is the above Sn plus one more for the number 1000...000. If the upper limit is an arbitrary number you will need to get creative once again. Think along the lines that went into developing the formula for Sn.

Answer 2

You can break this down recursively. The sum of the digits of an 18-digit number are the sums of the first 9 digits plus the last 9 digits. Likewise the sum of the digits of a 9-bit number will be the sum of the first 4 or 5 digits plus the sum of the last 5 or 4 digits. Naturally you can special-case when the value is 0.

Answer 3

Reading your edit: computing that function in a loop for i between 1 and 1000000000000000000 takes a long time. This is a no brainer.
1000000000000000000 is one billion billion. Your processor will be able to do at best billions of operations per second. Even with a nonexistant 4-5 Ghz processor, and assuming best case it compiles down to an add, a mod, a div, and a compare jump, you could only do 1 billion iterations per second, meaning it will take on the order of 1 billion seconds.

Answer 4

You probably don't want to do it in a bruteforce way. This seems to be more of a logical thinking question.
Note - 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = N(N+1)/2 = 45.
---- Changing the answer to make it clearer after David's comment
See David's answer - I had it wrong

Answer 5

Quite late to the party, but anyways, here is my solution. Sorry it's in Python and not C++, but it should be relatively easy to translate. And because this is primarily an algorithm problem, I hope that's ok.
As for the overflow problem, the only thing that comes to mind is to use arrays of digits instead of actual numbers. Given this algorithm I hope it won't affect performance too much.
https://gist.github.com/frnhr/7608873
It uses these three recursions I found by looking and poking at the problem. Rather then trying to come up with some general and arcane equations, here are three examples. A general case should be easily visible from those.
relation 1
Reduces function calls with arbitrary argument to several recursive calls with more predictable arguments for use in relations 2 and 3.
foo(3456) == foo(3000)
+ foo(400) + 400 * (3)
+ foo(50) + 50 * (3 + 4)
+ foo(6) + 6 * (3 + 4 + 5)
relation 2
Reduce calls with an argument in the form L*10^M (e.g: 30, 7000, 900000) to recursive call usable for relation 3. These triangular numbers popped in quite uninvited (but welcome) :)
triangular_numbers = [0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36] # 0 not used
foo(3000) == 3 * foo(1000) + triangular_numbers[3 - 1] * 1000
Only useful if L > 1. It holds true for L = 1 but is trivial. In that case, go directly to relation 3.
relation 3
Recursively reduce calls with argument in format 1*10^M to a call with argument that's divided by 10.
foo(1000) == foo(100) * 10 + 44 * 100 + 100 - 9 # 44 and 9 are constants
Ultimately you only have to really calculate the sum or digits for numbers 0 to 10, and it turns out than only up to 3 of these calculations are needed. Everything else is taken care of with this recursion. I'm pretty sure it runs in O(logN) time. That's FAAST!!!!!11one
On my laptop it calculates the sum of digit sums for a given number with over 1300 digits in under 7 seconds! Your test (1000000000000000000) gets calculated in 0.000112057 seconds!

Answer 6

I think you cannot do better than O(N) where N is the number of digits in the given number(which is not computationally expensive)
However if I understood your question correctly (the range) you want to output the sum of digits for a range of numbers. In that case, you can increment by one when you go from number0 to number9 and then decrease by 8.

Answer 7

You will need to cheat - look for mathematical patterns that let you short-cut your computations.
For example, do you really need to test that input != 0 every time? Does it matter if you add 0/10 several times? Since it won't matter, consider unrolling the loop.
Can you do the calculation in a larger base, eg, base 10^2, 10^3, etcetera, that might allow you to reduce the number of digits, which you'll then have to convert back to base 10? If this works, you'll be able to implement a cache more easily.
Consider looking at compiler intrinsics that let you give hints to the compiler for branch prediction.
Given that this is C++, consider implementing this using template metaprogramming.
Given that sum_of_digits is purely functional, consider caching the results.
Now, most of those suggestions will backfire - but the point I'm making is that if you have hit the limits of what your computer can do for a given algorithm, you do need to find a different solution.
This is probably an excellent starting point if you want to investigate this in detail: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DigitSum.html

Answer 8

Possibility 1:
You could make it faster by feeding the result of one iteration of the loop into the next iteration.
For example, if i == 365, the result is 14. In the next loop, i == 366 -- 1 more than the previous result. The sum is also 1 more: 3 + 6 + 6 = 15.
Problems arise when there is a carry digit. If i == 99 (ie. result = 18), the next loop's result isn't 19, it's 1. You'll need extra code to detect this case.
Possibility 2:
While thinking though the above, it occurred to me that the sequence of results from sum_of_digits when graphed would resemble a sawtooth. With some analysis of the resulting graph (which I leave as an exercise for the reader), it may be possible to identify a method to allow direct calculation of the sum result.
However, as some others have pointed out: Even with the fastest possible implementation of sum_of_digits and the most optimised loop code, you can't possibly calculate 1000000000000000000 results in any useful timeframe, and certainly not in less than one second.

Answer 9

Edit: It seems you want the the sum of the actual digits such that: 12345 = 1+2+3+4+5 not the count of digits, nor the sum of all numbers 1 to 12345 (inclusive);
As such the fastest you can get is:
long long sum_of_digits(long long input) {
long long total = input % 10;
while ((input /= 10) != 0)
total += input % 10;
return total;
}
Which is still going to be slow when you're running enough iterations. Your requirement of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000L iterations is One Million, Million, Million. Given 100 Million takes around 10,000ms on my computer, one can expect that it will take 100ms per 1 million records, and you want to do that another million million times. There are only 86400 seconds in a day, so at best we can compute around 86,400 Million records per day. It would take one computer
Lets suppose your method could be performed in a single float operation (somehow), suppose you are using the K computer which is currently the fastest (Rmax) supercomputer at over 10 petaflops, if you do the math that is = 10,000 Million Million floating operations per second. This means that your 1 Million, Million, Million loop will take the world's fastest non-distributed supercomputer 100 seconds to compute the sums (IF it took 1 float operation to calculate, which it can't), so you will need to wait around for quite some time for computers to become 100 so much more powerful for your solution to be runable in under one second.
What ever you're trying to do, you're either trying to do an unsolvable problem in near real-time (eg: graphics calculation related) or you misunderstand the question / task that was given you, or you are expected to perform something faster than any (non-distributed) computer system can do.
If your task is actually to sum all the digits of a range as you show and then output them, the answer is not to improve the for loop. for example:
1 = 0
10 = 46
100 = 901
1000 = 13501
10000 = 180001
100000 = 2250001
1000000 = 27000001
10000000 = 315000001
100000000 = 3600000001
From this you could work out a formula to actually compute the total sum of all digits for all numbers from 1 to N. But it's not clear what you really want, beyond a much faster computer.

Answer 10

No the best, but simple:
int DigitSumRange(int a, int b) {
int s = 0;
for (; a <= b; a++)
for(c : to_string(a))
s += c-48;
return s;
}

Answer 11

A Python function is given below, which converts the number to a string and then to a list of digits and then finds the sum of these digits.
def SumDigits(n):
ns=list(str(n))
z=[int(d) for d in ns]
return(sum(z))

Answer 12

In C++ one of the fastest way can be using strings.
first of all get the input from users in a string. Then add each element of string after converting it into int. It can be done using -> (str[i] - '0').
#include<iostream>
#include<string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{ string str;
cin>>str;
long long int sum=0;
for(long long int i=0;i<str.length();i++){
sum = sum + (str[i]-'0');
}
cout<<sum;
}

Answer 13

The formula for finding the sum of the digits of numbers between 1 to N is:
(1 + N)*(N/2)
[http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/57919.html][1]
There is a class written in C# which supports a number with more than the supported max-limit of long.
You can find it here. [Oyster.Math][2]
Using this class, I have generated a block of code in c#, may be its of some help to you.
using Oyster.Math;
class Program
{
private static DateTime startDate;
static void Main(string[] args)
{
startDate = DateTime.Now;
Console.WriteLine("Finding Sum of digits from {0} to {1}", 1L, 1000000000000000000L);
sum_of_digits(1000000000000000000L);
Console.WriteLine("Time Taken for the process: {0},", DateTime.Now - startDate);
Console.ReadLine();
}
private static void sum_of_digits(long input)
{
var answer = IntX.Multiply(IntX.Parse(Convert.ToString(1 + input)), IntX.Parse(Convert.ToString(input / 2)), MultiplyMode.Classic);
Console.WriteLine("Sum: {0}", answer);
}
}
Please ignore this comment if it is not relevant for your context.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20171225182632/http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/57919.html
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20171223050751/http://intx.codeplex.com/

Answer 14

If you want to find the sum for the range say 1 to N then simply do the following
long sum = N(N+1)/2;
it is the fastest way.