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Weekly Programming Challenge 1: Next Palindrome

The document discusses finding the next palindrome for a given integer number. It defines what a palindrome is, provides examples, and outlines a naive approach of incrementing the number and checking for palindromes in a loop. This approach is inefficient, especially for large numbers, and the challenge is to design a more efficient algorithm and program to solve the problem.

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Sundar Singh
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24 views1 page

Weekly Programming Challenge 1: Next Palindrome

The document discusses finding the next palindrome for a given integer number. It defines what a palindrome is, provides examples, and outlines a naive approach of incrementing the number and checking for palindromes in a loop. This approach is inefficient, especially for large numbers, and the challenge is to design a more efficient algorithm and program to solve the problem.

Uploaded by

Sundar Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Weekly Programming Challenge 1

Next Palindrome

Let us first define what we mean by a palindrome.

Definition : An integer is a palindrome if it has the same value even after reversing all
its digits.
Examples :
14541, 33, 9870789 are palindromes but 23, 933, 89989 are not palindromes.

Design a JAVA program which, for a positive integer n, computes the smallest integer
greater than n which is a palindrome. Your program should run efficiently for arbitrarily
large value of n. More specifically, declare n as variable of type long, for any arbitrarily
large value of n, your program should take at most a few seconds (in fact millisecond if
possible).

For example :
for n = 1234501234, the output should be 1234554321. for n = 325986, the output should
be 326623.
A naive approach to solve the problem would be the following :

check if n+1 is a palindrome


if not, check if n+2 is a palindrome
if not, check if n+3 is a palindrome
.
.
and so on.
The java program based on the above approach will have a while loop which will
terminate when we find a palindrome. In each iteration we increment n and check if n is
a palindrome. If yes, we terminate the loop. We may use some Boolean variable which is
initialized as false, and set to true when we find a palindrome. The condition of while
loop will be (flag==false). The exact JAVA code of this program is also available at
the course website (Lecture 7), and was discussed and executed in the class itself.
It can be easily seen that this program will eventually terminate since there are infinite
palindromes. The correctness of the program is thus obvious. But the time taken may be
huge for some inputs. Compile and execute the program on some bad inputs to convince
yourself. The reason for its slowness is that the number of iterations of the while loop
in this program may be very large. For example, for n = 123456789000000000, the next
palindrome will be 123456789987654321, and in this case the number of iterations will
be 987654321. So this program wont give you answer in seconds. It may even take
hours/days for such inputs. So we realize that the above program/algorithm is very
inefficient.
So the challenge is to design an efficient program/algorithm to find the next palindrome
for a given integer n.

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