Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Given an array of values, I want to find the total “score”, where the score of each element is the number of elements with a smaller value that occur before it in the array.
e.g.
values: 4 1 3 2 5
scores: 0 0 1 1 4
total score: 6
An O(n^2) algorithm is trivial, but I suspect it may be possible to do it in O(nlgn), by sorting the array. Does anyone have any ideas how to do that, or if it’s not possible?
Looks like what you are doing is essentially counting the number of pairs of elements that are in the incorrect relative order (i.e. number of inversions). This can be done in O(n*log(n)) by using the same idea as merge sort. As you merge, you just count the number of elements that are in the left list but should have been on the right list (and vice versa).