Here's two ways of approaching a method which merges two ordered sub-decks of playing cards into one ordered deck:
Approach 1:
public static Deck merge(Deck d1, Deck d2) {
Deck result = new Deck(d1.cards.length + d2.cards.length);
int i = 0;
int j = 0;
for (int k = 0; k < result.cards.length; k++) {
if (j >= d2.cards.length || i < d1.cards.length && d1.cards[i].compareTo(d2.cards[j]) <= 0) {
result.cards[k] = d1.cards[i];
i++;
} else {
result.cards[k] = d2.cards[j];
j++;
}
}
return result;
}
Approach 2:
public static Deck merge(Deck d1, Deck d2) {
Deck result = new Deck(l1+l2);
Card[] c1 = d1.getCards();
Card[] c2 = d2.getCards();
int l1 = c1.length;
int l2 = c2.length;
Card[] sorted = new Card[l1+l2];
int i = 0;
int j = 0;
for (int k = 0;k<sorted.length;k++){
if (j >= c2.length || i < c1.length && c1[i].compareTo(c2[j]) <= 0){
sorted[k] = c1[i];
i++;
}
else {
sorted[k] = c2[j];
j++;
}
}
}
result.cards = sorted;
return result;
}
Which method is more efficient? Is there actually any difference?
From what I can tell the first method would have to generate a much larger amount of objects to complete a run for, let's say, two 26 card sub decks. However, the method itself would store less information which makes me question which method would be more efficient.
I know on this scale it probably doesn't matter too much, but as someone who's very new to Java, I'm curious to know what is best practice and why. I've tried searching for similar scenarios but haven't managed to find any. If anyone could point me in the right direction, it'd be greatly appreciated.
Since getCards() is simply returning a reference variable (i.e. it is not copying the cards array) the performance difference is likely to be minimal.
The only way be sure is to benchmark the two versions of the application. But if the difference measured is anything more than a couple of percentage points, the benchmark1 is probably flawed!
I would advise not to waste your time "optimizing at this level" unless you have clear evidence that:
the code is too slow, and
you have clear evidence that the code that you are about to optimize is a substantial contributor to the slowness.
In other words, benchmark then profile then optimize the parts of the code that are worth optimizing.
1 - It is advisable to read up on how to write a sound benchmark before you leap into coding. Start with: How do I write a correct micro-benchmark in Java?.
Your first approach will create two objects - the new Deck object, and the array storing the cards (the array created by the Deck constructor). Your second approach will create 3 objects - the new Deck, the array created by the Deck constructor, and also your array named sorted.
However, this does not really matter because you are not creating Card objects at all. You are just copying a reference of the Card objects in the two decks to the new deck! Assigning Cards to arrays doesn't create new cards. It's just like the following won't create two objects:
Object obj = new Object();
Object obj2 = obj;
So practically the two approaches are the same. I suggest you use the one that you find most readable.
Related
I just recently started learning java and today I learned how I can do the so called selection sort. I have been trying for the last 3 hours to do a bucket sort, but there are some parts which I don't know how to code. Important : I am learning java completely by myself with a book. I am not a student and I am doing this as a hobby. I already googled everything I could think of and I didn't find a solution. I don't have a teacher or anybody who I can ask, so yea, any help would be appreciated!
Code:
private int[] bucketSort() {
int[]bucket=new int[maxSize+1];
int[]sortedElements = new int[elementaros.length];
for(int i=0; i<elementaros.length;i++) {
bucket[elementaros[i]]++; //it says that I can't convert from Car to int. How can I add the elements of array elemenators to bucket?
}
int outPos = 0;
for (int j = 0; j < bucket.length; j++){
for (int k = 0; k < bucket[i]; k++){
sortedElements[outPos++] = i;
}
}
return bucket;
}
The idea of the code :
I have an array elements of type Car(Car is another class of my program). It looks like this - Car[] elementaros. int maxSize shows the maximum number of administrable Car objects. What I want to do is the following - I want to sort the elements in the elementaros array alphabetically. I would really really appreciate it if somebody has the time to show me how this would function with an example code or would just give me some tips. As I said - I have nobody who I can ask.
A selection sort is a combination of searching and sorting.
The principle is quite simple but I always prefer a diagram than huge explanations.
Start a pointer at the beginning of your unsorted array. Then, for each value of the array, search for the minimum value (or search for the alphabeticaly ordered car) in your array and switch the position of the founded Car with the pointer (which is a Car too)
Then you can advance the pointer to the next element of the array.
Here is a basic implementation to do this
public static Car[] doSelectionSort(Car[] elementaros) {
for (int i = 0; i < elementaros.length - 1; i++) {
int index = i;
for (int j = i + 1; j < elementaros.length; j++) {
if (elementaros[j].getName().compareTo(elementaros[index].getName()) < 0) {
index = j;
}
}
Car nextOrderedCar = elementaros[index];
elementaros[index] = elementaros[i];
elementaros[i] = nextOrderedCar;
}
return elementaros;
}
Just for example sake, I imagine your object of type Car has a name that we could use for the comparison.
UPDATE 1:
I have read your initial question too quickly and it leds me to answer a total different sorting algorithm. My bad.
I found an implementation here that does the trick:
williamfiset bucket sort
explanation of bucket sort plus different implementation
Hope this helps.
Say, I'm making a simple badugi card game where the Hand is represented by 10 characters in a string. E.g:
2s3h5dQs - 2 of spades, 3 of hearts, 5 of diamonds, Queen of spades
Now, in this badugi card game I want to create two loops where the first loop checks if all the ranks are different(none of them can be the same) and the other loop checks if all the suits are different. If both of these conditions return as true where they all have different ranks and suits, the hand has drawn a badugi(please excuse my lack of terminology where necessary.)
Now, how can I create an efficient loop for such a situation? I was thinking that I could create several if statements as such:
if (hand.charAt(0) != hand.charAt(2) && hand.charAt(0) != hand.charAt(4) && hand.charAt(0) != hand.charAt(6))
if (hand.charAt(2) != hand.charAt(0) && hand.charAt(2) != hand.charAt(4) && hand.charAt(2) != hand.charAt(6))
... and so forth comparing every single index to one another. But this gets tedious and seems very unprofessional. So my question is, how do I write an efficient loop for this scenario? How can I compare/check if there are no matches at these specific index points to one another?
If I haven't explained properly then please let me know.
Please keep in mind, I am not allowed freedom of how to formulate a hand. It has to be in the format above
You are putting your energy into the wrong place.
You do not need to worry about efficiency at all.
Instead, you should worry about creating a clean design (based on reasonable abstractions) and then write code that is super-easy to read and understand.
And your current approach fails both of those ideas; unfortunately completely.
In other words: you do not represent hands and values as characters within a String.
You create a class that abstracts a Card (with its value and face).
And then a "hand" becomes a List / array of such Card objects. And then you can use concepts such as Comparator to compare card values, or you can make use of equals() ...
And even when you wish to keep your (actually over-complex) naive, simple approach of using chars within a string; then you should at least use some kind of looping so that you don't compare charAt(0) against charAt(2); but maybe charAt(i) against charAt(j).
And following your edit and the excellent comment by jsheeran: even when you are forced to deal with this kind of "string notation"; you could still write reasonable code ... that takes such string as input, but transforms them into something that makes more sense.
For example, the Card class constructor could take two chars for suite/value.
But to get you going with your actual question; you could something like:
public boolean isCardDistinctFromAllOtherCards(int indexToCheck) {
for (int i=0; i<cardString.length-1; i+=2) {
if (i == indexToCheck) {
continue;
}
if (cardString.charAt(indexToCheck) == cardString.charAt(i)) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
( the above is just an idea how to write down a method that checks that all chars at 0, 2, 4, ... are not matching some index x).
You should really think about your design, like creating Card class etc., but back to the question now, since it's not gonna solve it.
I suggest adding all 4 values to a Set and then checking if size of the Set is 4. You can even shortcut it and while adding this yourSet.add(element) return false then it means there is already that element in the set and they are not unique. That hardly matters here since you only need to add 4 elements, but it may be useful in the future if you work with more elements.
I would advice creating an array with these chars you are referencing just to clean up the fact you are using indices. i.e create a vals array and a suits array.
This would be my suggestion by using a return or break the loop will stop this means when a match is found it wont have to loop through the rest of the elements .. Hope this helps !
private static int check(char[] vals, char[] suits){
int flag;
for(int i=0; i<=vals.length-2;i++){
for(int k=vals.length-1; k<=0;k++){
if(vals[i]==vals[k]){
flag=-1;
return flag;
}
if(suits[i]==suits[k]){
flag=1;
return flag;
}
}
}
return 0;
}
Why not simply iterate over your string and check for same ranks or suits:
public class NewClass {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(checkRanks("2s3h5dQs"));
System.out.println(checkSuits("2s3h5dQs"));
}
public static boolean checkRanks(String hand){
List<Character> list = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 0; i< hand.length(); i+=2){
if (!list.contains(hand.charAt(i))){
list.add(hand.charAt(i));
}
else{
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
public static boolean checkSuits(String hand){
List<Character> list = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 1; i< hand.length(); i+=2){
if (!list.contains(hand.charAt(i))){
list.add(hand.charAt(i));
}
else{
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
}
Currently I have this for code and my game either uses way to much memory when generating (over a GB) or if I set it low, it will give a
WORLD_SIZE_X & WORLD_SIZE_Z = 256;
WORLD_SIZE_Y = 128;
Does anyone know how I could improve this so it doesn't use so much RAM?
Thanks! :)
public void generate() {
for(int xP = 0; xP < WORLD_SIZE_X; xP++) {
for(int zP = 0; zP < WORLD_SIZE_Z; zP++) {
for(int yP = 0; yP < WORLD_SIZE_Y; yP++) {
try {
blocks[xP][yP][zP] = new BlockAir();
if(yP == 4) {
blocks[xP][yP][zP] = new BlockGrass();
}
if(yP < 4) {
blocks[xP][yP][zP] = new BlockDirt();
}
if(yP == 0) {
blocks[xP][yP][zP] = new BlockUnbreakable();
}
} catch(Exception e) {}
}
//Tree Generation :D
Random rX = new Random();
Random rZ = new Random();
if(rX.nextInt(WORLD_SIZE_X) < WORLD_SIZE_X / 6 && rZ.nextInt(WORLD_SIZE_Z) < WORLD_SIZE_Z / 6) {
for(int j = 0; j < 5; j++) {
blocks[xP][5 + j][zP] = new BlockLog();
}
}
}
}
generated = true;
}
Delay object creation until you really need to access one of these voxels. You can write a method (I'm assuming Block as the common subclass of all the Block classes):
Block getBlockAt( int x, int y, int z )
using code similar what you have in your threefold loop, plus using a hash map Map<Integer,Block> for storing the random stuff, e.g. trees: from x, y and z compute an integer (x*128 + y)*256 + z and use this as the key.
Also, consider that for all "air", "log", "dirt" blocks you may not need a separate object unless something must be changed at a certain block. Until then, share a single object of a kind.
Cause you just give small piece of code, I can give you two suggestions:
compact the object size. Seems very stupid but very easy to do. Just imagine you have thousands of objects in your memory. If everyone can be compacted half size, you can save half memory :).
Just assign the value to array when you need it. Sometime it is not work if you need really need a assigned array. So just assign values to elements in array as LESS as you can. If you can show me more code, I can help you more.
Are you sure the problem is in this method? Unless Block objects are really big, 256*256*128 ~= 8M objects should not require 1 GB ...
That said, if the blocks do not hold state, it would be more memory efficient to use an enum (or even a byte instead), as we would not need a separate object for each block:
enum Block {
air, grass, dirt, log, unbreakable;
}
Block[][][] map = ...
Say I have 4 objects and I am looking to populate an arraylist of 100 elements with these four objects. Basically each time we add an elements to the arraylist, there is a 1 in 4 chance each element will be chosen. I thought of one way to do it but I think there is a better, more "pretty" & effective way
just rough pseudo-code to help explain
for(int i = 0; i != 100; i++){
Random generator = new Random();
int i = generator.nextInt(4); // this will give us 0,1,2,or 3
if(i ==0){
arraylist.add(object1(param1, param2));
}
// etc.. continues with 3 other else if statments and objects
ideas? All the other objects I have also share the same interface, if that can help us
Start with an array containing the four objects:
Object[] objects = new Object[] {
object1(param1, param2),
object2(param1),
object3(param1, param2, param3, param4),
object4(param1, param2)
}
Then adjust your code:
Random generator = new Random();
for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++){
int j = generator.nextInt(4); // this will give us 0,1,2,or 3
arraylist.add(objects[j]);
// etc.. continues with 3 other else if statments and objects
}
Notice that you don't have to create a new generator on every iteration - you can create it just once and reuse the same instance.
I created two methods for my Bingo Game in Java. One method creates a new board which populates the Bingo Board with integers according to the Bingo rule (1-75). My second method generates random numbers with a range of 1 - 75.
public static int drawNum(){
Random rand = new Random();
int num = rand.nextInt(75)+1;
return num;
}
public static void bingoCard(){
int [][]card=new int [5][5];
ArrayList<Integer> alreadyUsed = new ArrayList<Integer>();
boolean valid = false;
int tmp = 0;
for(int i = 0; i <= 4; i++){
for(int row = 0; row < card.length; row++){
while(!valid){
tmp = (int)(Math.random() * 15) + 1 + 15 * i;
if(!alreadyUsed.contains(tmp)){
valid = true;
alreadyUsed.add(tmp);
}
}
card[row][i] = tmp;
valid = false;
}
}
card[2][2] = 0;
//create array to make title.
String title []={"B","I","N","G","O"};
for(int i=0;i<title.length;i++){
System.out.print(title[i]+ "\t");
}
System.out.println();
for(int row=0;row<card.length;row++){
for(int col=0;col<card[row].length;col++){
System.out.print(card[row][col]+ "\t");
}
System.out.println();
}
}
What I need help with is, how do I check whether or not the drawNum() method corresponds to any values stored inside my bingoCard() array? If so, print out a new array with the integers filled in. If the condition is met for a bingo, then you win.
I hope I don't make it sound like I want you to do it for me, but I am confused as to how to start coding that part. Thank you.
This my recommendation - Learn Object Oriented Programming immediately
I see you are using objects provided in the JDK, so why not learn to make your own?
Make two classes with the following methods (-) and members (+) (PS. This is not a formal way to document code)
BingoCard
+list of numbers on card
-reset() : gets new numbers for this card
-test(BingoDrawer) : Tests to see if this card won on this drawing
-toString() : returns a String representation of this card
BingoDrawer
+list of numbers drawn
-reset() : draws new numbers
-hasNumber(int number) : tests if this number was drawn
-toString() : returns a String representation of this drawing
One more suggestions
Instead of keeping track of what you used, keep track of what you have not used, it will make things much easier because you can just choose stuff from that list randomly. Unlike your current action which is choosing (a logical number) from thin air and hoping (which causes issues) it is not a collision
If you follow my recommendation you can write code like this
public static void main(String[] args) {
BingoCard bc = new BingoCard();
BingoDrawer bd = new BingoDrawer();
while(thePlayerWantsToPlay()) { //function to be defined by you
bc.reset();
bd.reset();
System.out.println(bc);
System.out.println(bd);
System.out.println(bc.test(bd));
}
}
You can take it a step further and make a BingoGame class and do what I did in main there and just create an instance of BingoGame and call some start method on the object.
For checking if you have the number in your board, read through the board in a similar manner as you do for the already_used numbers, except with the number the user just entered.
The conditions for the user to win should be checked after the board has another number guessed.
There are a few ways to do this, a simple one would be to iterate over every possible pattern that could win, checking to see if there are tokens there.
All of this would be in a loop, that goes a little like this:
Set up board via user entering numbers.
Start loop
set either a timer to wait for, or wait for a keypress (so the game doesn't just play really fast)
Get random number
Possibly add to board
Check if winner
if winner, break the loop and do something else.
Print the new board out.
(end of loop)
If they got here, that could mean they won!
Wait to exit
You can just write it out as pseudo-code and fill in the methods after that. It usually helps to work on these things in a top-down fashion. So, for bingo you might have:
board = generateBoard();
while (!bingoFound(board)) {
number = drawNumber();
board = stampNumbers(board, number);
}
If that makes sense, you can go a step deeper and define each method. For example, bingoFound might look like:
public boolean bingoFound(int[][] board) {
boolean wasFound = bingoRowFound(board)
|| bingoColFound(board)
|| bingoDiagonalFound(board);
return wasFound;
}
Again, I've defined everything in (mostly) pseudo-code. If this looks ok, you can move a step deeper. Let's define the bingoRowFound method.
public boolean bingoRowFound(int[][] board) {
for (int row = 0; row < NUM_ROWS; row++) {
boolean rowIsABingo = true;
for (int col = 0; col < NUM_COLS; col++) {
// We have to check that everything up until this point has
// been marked off. I am using -1 to indicate that a spot has
// been marked.
rowIsABingo = rowIsABingo && board[row][col] == -1;
}
if (rowIsABingo) { return rowIsABingo; }
}
return false; // If we didn't find a bingo, return false.
}
Some of the methods (like drawNumber) will be really easy to implement. Others, like looking for a diagonal bingo might be a bit more difficult.
Feb 12 2014 Update:
Retracted code, since this was a college course assignment, and I want to prevent people just copying the code. I almost got in trouble for being accused of sharing code (which is a nono in assignments) when another student lifted my code from my Github repo and sent it in as their own.
There were two classes, one main class and a class to hold my methods and constructors.
BINGOFINAL.java was my main class.
Bingo_Card.java held my constructor and methods.
If you want to run this, make sure you create a new project called BINGOFINAL, and put Bingo_Card.java into that same */src/ extension.