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5
About the Series
First off, you may treat this like any other code golf challenge, and answer it without worrying about the series at all. However, there is a leaderboard across all challenges. You can find the leaderboard along with some more information about the series in the first post.
Although I have a bunch of ideas lined up for the series, the future challenges are not set in stone yet. If you have any suggestions, please let me know on the relevant sandbox post.
Hole 3: Integer Partitions
Time to increase the difficulty a bit.
A partition of a positive integer n
is defined as a multiset of positive integers which sum to n
. As an example if n = 5
, the following partitions exist:
{1,1,1,1,1}
{2,1,1,1}
{2,2,1}
{3,1,1}
{3,2}
{4,1}
{5}
Note that these are multisets, so there is no order to them, {3,1,1}
, {1,3,1}
and {1,1,3}
are all considered identical.
Your task is, given n
, to generate a random partition of n
. Here are the detailed rules:
The distribution of partitions produced must be uniform. That is, in the above example, each partition should be returned with probability 1/7.
Of course, due to the technical limitations of PRNGs, perfect uniformity will be impossible. For the purpose of assessing uniformity of your submission, the following operations will be regarded as yielding perfectly uniform distributions:
- Obtaining a number from a PRNG (over any range), which is documented to be (approximately) uniform.
- Mapping a uniform distribution over a larger set of numbers onto a smaller set via modulo or multiplication (or some other operation which distributes values evenly). The larger set has to contain at least 1024 times as many possible values as the smaller set.
Since the partitions are multisets you may return them in any order, and this order does not have to be consistent. However, for the purpose of the random distribution, the order is ignored. That is, in the above example,
{3,1,1}
,{1,3,1}
and{1,1,3}
together must have a probability of 1/7 of being returned.- Your algorithm must have a deterministic runtime. In particular, you cannot generate random multisets and reject them if they don't sum to
n
. - Your algorithm's time complexity must be polynomial in
n
. In particular, you cannot simply generate all partitions and select a random one (since the number of partitions grows exponentially withn
). You may assume that the PRNG you're using can return uniformly distributed values in O(1) per value. - You must not use any built-in function which solves this task.
You may write a full program or a function and take input via STDIN or closest alternative, command-line argument or function argument and produce output via return value or by printing to STDOUT (or closest alternative).
You may assume that n ≤ 65
(such that the number of partitions is less than 221). Output may be in any convenient, unambiguous list or string format.
If you submit a function, please consider also providing a little test program which calls the function a number of times and prints the results. It's okay if the parameters have to be tweaked in the code. This is just so people can check that the solution is at least approximately uniform.
This is code golf, so the shortest submission (in bytes) wins. And of course, the shortest submission per user will also enter into the overall leaderboard of the series.
Leaderboard
The first post of the series generates a leaderboard.
To make sure that your answers show up, please start every answer with a headline, using the following Markdown template:
# Language Name, N bytes
where N
is the size of your submission. If you improve your score, you can keep old scores in the headline, by striking them through. For instance:
# Ruby, <s>104</s> <s>101</s> 96 bytes
(The language is not currently shown, but the snippet does require and parse it, and I may add a by-language leaderboard in the future.)
2How does one get help from Roger Hui? – FUZxxl – 2015-03-01T13:52:53.487
5Write a toy APL interpreter to get yourself hired in the same company as him. Pose the above expression as a challenge, promise a pint of beer for every character he takes out. Then profit: fewer characters and more booze as he doesn't drink beer. – ngn – 2015-03-01T20:57:19.913
1I see. That's a neat strategy, let's see if I can reproduce that… Can you ask him if Dyalog APL is going to get something like J's
u/\. y
any time soon? – FUZxxl – 2015-03-01T21:04:11.540For the record: https://twitter.com/FUZxxl/status/572377068555644929
– ngn – 2015-03-02T19:04:29.947Thank you for asking him. Now I wonder if it's possible in linear time, too. – FUZxxl – 2015-03-02T19:26:32.110