NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

SCHOOL OF COMPUTING
Midterm (14%)
AY2018/19 Semester 4

CS2040 – Data Structures and Algorithms

12 July 2019 Time allowed: 90 minutes

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES
1. Do NOT open the question paper until you are told to do so.

2. This question paper contains TWO (2) sections with sub-questions. Each section has a
different length and different number of sub-questions. It comprises EIGHT (8) printed
pages, including this page.

3. Answer all questions in this paper itself. You can use either pen or pencil. Write legibly!

4. This is an Open Book Quiz. You can check the lecture notes, tutorial files, problem set files,
CP3 book, or any other books that you think will be useful. But remember that the more
time that you spend flipping through your files implies that you have less time to actually
answer the questions.

5. When this Quiz starts, please immediately write your Matriculation Number and Tutorial
Group.

6. The total marks for this paper is 40.

TUTORIAL GROUP

A
STUDENT NUMBER:

For examiners’ use only

Question Max Marks
Q1-4 12
Q5 10
Q6 10
Q7 8

Total 40

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

Section A – Analysis (12 Marks)

Prove (the statement is correct) or disprove (the statement is wrong) the following
statements below. If you want to prove it, provide the proof or at least a convincing
argument. If you want to disprove it, provide at least one counter example. 3 marks per each
statement below (1 mark for circling true or false, 2 marks for explanation):

1. The time complexity of the following program when n >> 2*m is O(n*m). [true/false]

public static void main(String[] args) {

Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
int n = sc.nextInt();
int m = sc.nextInt();
int result = 0;

for (int i=0; i < n; i++) {

for (int j=m; j > 0; j--)
result += 1;
m -= 1;
}
System.out.println(result);
}

2. Given the same input, selection sort will always have time complexity equal to or worse
than optimized bubblesort. [true/false]

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

3. For a queue of size N, in order to access any item in the queue, the worst time complexity
is O(N), assuming you are only restricted to queue operations (poll(), offer(), peek()).
[true/false]

4. Given strings of length 𝑑𝑑, where 𝑑𝑑 > 3, and containing only the characters
{‘0’,’1’,’2’,’3’,’4’,’5’,’6’,’7’,’8’,’9’}. If characters in each position are uniformly distributed
among the digits (i.e if there are 100 strings of length 4, then 10 strings will have ‘0’ as
the 1st character, 10 strings will have ‘1’ as the 1st character and so on …), then the time
to insert each string into a hashtable of size 103 will take at least 𝑂𝑂(𝑑𝑑) time since you
need to convert each string into an integer key (e.g using the *31 method) before
inserting into the hashtable in order to distribute the strings evenly into the hashtable.
[true/false]

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

Section B – Applications (28 Marks)

Write in pseudo-code. Any algorithm/data structure/data structure operation not taught in

CS2040 must be described, there must be no black boxes. Partial marks will be awarded for
correct answers not meeting the time complexity required.

5. New linked list operation [10 marks]

Given 2 sorted non-empty linked list 𝑎𝑎 and 𝑏𝑏 (containing integers), give an algorithm to
merge them into 1 sorted linked list 𝑐𝑐 (You don’t need to preserve 𝑎𝑎 and 𝑏𝑏 after creating
𝑐𝑐). You may assume that this is a basic linked list, that you CANNOT make use of any of the
linked list operations given in the lectures/Java API, and you HAVE access to the head
reference of the two input lists. (It might be easier to write as close to java code as possible
for this question).

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6. Baby name search engine [10 marks]

After having 5 children, Jeremy and his wife realized how important it is to be able to
efficiently search for good and unique names for their children. To this end, Jeremy who has
a list of 𝑁𝑁 (1,000,000 ≤ 𝑁𝑁 ≤ 500,000,000) names for babies registered by the social service
administration from 1880 to 2018 wants to use it to create a search engine for baby names.

The information in the list of registered baby names that is used for the search engine is
I) The name of the baby where characters are only letters from the English alphabet and
the maximum length of a baby names is 100 character. Note that there will be lots of
repeated names in the list.
II) The gender of the baby – represented as 'M' or 'F' for male or female.

Jeremy knows you are taking CS2040 and wants your help to do this. As a start the search
engine should implement the following operation:

List<String> search(int type, int p)

which will return a list of unique baby names from the list of 𝑁𝑁 registered baby names, given
the input parameters, which are as follows:

• The baby names must be of gender 'M' (type == 1), 'F' (type == 2) or both (type == 3)
• the baby names must only appear in <= 𝒑𝒑% of the 𝑁𝑁 registered baby names where 1 ≤
𝑝𝑝 ≤ 100.

In order to be efficient each call to search must run in 𝑂𝑂(𝑀𝑀) time where 𝑀𝑀 is the number
of baby names returned.

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

a) Give the algorithm and appropriate data structure(s) for a preprocessing method
preprocess() (this is a method that is called once before the search engine is used)
which will process all the 𝑁𝑁 baby names (which is not sorted) and store them in the
mentioned data structure(s) so that later on each call to search can be done in 𝑂𝑂(𝑀𝑀)
time. preprocess() must run in 𝑂𝑂(𝑁𝑁) time. [6 marks]

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

b) Now give the algorithm for search. You may assume the arguments given to search is
always valid. [4 marks]

7. Missing family members [8 marks]

The Addams family have just gone on a fishing trip and taken a photo. The tradition of the
Addams family is to line up for their family photos, where each member of the family will
wear a shirt having a number 𝑥𝑥 where 1 ≤ 𝑥𝑥 ≤ 𝑁𝑁 (𝑁𝑁 being the number of members in the
family). The oldest will wear shirt 1, the second oldest will wear shirt 2, and so on and the
youngest will wear shirt 𝑁𝑁.

Now if there are 6 members in the family, they could line up as such: 1,2,4,5,6,3

After coming back from the trip, the Evve family who has been at odds with the Addams
family has cast a spell on the photo and remove some of the members from the lineup in
the photo. So if the original sequence is 1,2,4,5,6,3 after removing 2 and 5 from the photo it
will result in the remaining subsequence 1,4,6,3.

In order to fix the photo, Michael Addams the patriarch of the family needs to know the
exact sequence of the lineup in the photo. However, no one can quite remember the exact
lineup except that if one were to order all permutations of 1 to 𝑁𝑁 in ascending order of the
permutation sequences (e.g 1,2,3 will have the permutations in ascending order as {1,2,3},
{1,3,2}, {2,1,3}, {2,3,1}, {3,1,2}, {3,2,1}), the original sequence in the photo will be the first
such permutation that contains the remaining subsequence (sequence of the members
remaining in the photo).
You are now tasked with finding the original lineup sequence given 𝑁𝑁 and the remaining
subsequence 𝑆𝑆 (you can assume it is given in the form of a integer array). Give an algorithm
that can do so in time 𝑂𝑂(𝑁𝑁).

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 CS2040 Midterm (AY2018/19 Semester 4)

== END OF PAPER ==

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