Question

Recently, I tried to solve Problem 23 of Project Euler. For that I first create a list of all abundant numbers, called abundants.

Next I iterate over this list and build another list of all sums of abundant numbers that are below a certain limit. Now I noticed something strange. I use a nested loop to iterate twice over the list. But if I use an array to store the sum it takes some seconds, if I add the sums to an ArrayList it takes hours. What’s the reason for that? I thought the costly operation are the two nested loops, but it seems the costly operation is ArrayList#add. Any hints why this is the case?

Here the code for the array:

for (int i = 0; i < abundants.size(); i++) {
   for (int j = 0; j < abundants.size(); j++) {
      int tot = abundants.get(i) + abundants.get(j);
      if (tot <= limit)
         isSum[tot] = true;
      }
   }
}

Here the code for the ArrayList:

ArrayList<Integer> sums = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for (int i = 0; i < abundants.size(); i++) {
   for (int j = 0; j < abundants.size(); j++) {
      int s = abundants.get(i) + abundants.get(j);
      if (!sums.contains(s) && s < limit) {
         sums.add(s);
      }
   }
 }

Answer 1

Your ArrayList implementation is O(n^3) whereas the other is O(n^2): sums.contains(...) has to traverse the entire sums list for every iteration of your inner loop.