When the input is much too large to fit into memory, we have to do external sorting instead of internal sorting. One of the key steps in external sorting is to generate sets of sorted records (also called runs) with limited internal memory. The simplest method is to read as many records as possib…

A game of numbers has the following rules: at the beginning, two distinct positive integers are given by the judge. Then each player in turn must give a number to the judge. The number must be the difference of two numbers that are previously given, and must not be duplicated to any of the existe…

A safari park（家养动物园）has K species of animals, and is divided into N regions. The managers hope to spread the animals to all the regions, but not the same animals in the two neighboring regions. Of course, they also realize that this is an NP complete problem, you are not expected to solve …

The above picture is from Sina Weibo, showing May 23rd, 2019 as a very cool “Prime Day”. That is, not only that the corresponding number of the date 20190523 is a prime, but all its sub-strings ended at the last digit 3 are prime numbers.

Dijkstra’s algorithm is one of the very famous greedy algorithms. It is used for solving the single source shortest path problem which gives the shortest paths from one particular source vertex to all the other vertices of the given graph. It was conceived by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra…

Given a syntax tree (binary), you are supposed to output the corresponding postfix expression, with parentheses reflecting the precedences of the operators.

Given two singly linked lists L​1​​=$a​_1$​​→$a​_2$→⋯→$a​_{n-1}$​​→$a​_n$​​ and L​2​​=$b​_1​​$→$b​_2$​​→⋯→$b​_{m-1}$​​→$b​_m​​$​​. If n≥2m, you are supposed to reverse and merge the shorter one into the longer one to obtain a list like a​1​​→a​2​​→b​m​​→a​3​​→a​4​​→b​m−1​​⋯. For example, given on…

“Forever number” is a positive integer A with K digits, satisfying the following constrains:

A Cartesian tree is a binary tree constructed from a sequence of distinct numbers. The tree is heap-ordered, and an inorder traversal returns the original sequence. For example, given the sequence { 8, 15, 3, 4, 1, 5, 12, 10, 18, 6 }, the min-heap Cartesian tree is shown by the figure.

A summit (峰会) is a meeting of heads of state or government. Arranging the rest areas for the summit is not a simple job. The ideal arrangement of one area is to invite those heads so that everyone is a direct friend of everyone.