Question

So I just got back for the ACM Programing competition and did pretty well but there was one problem that not one team got.

The Problem.

Start with an integer N0 which is greater than 0. Let N1 be the number of ones in the binary representation of N0. So, if N0 = 27, N1 = 4. For all i > 0, let Ni be the number of ones in the binary representation of Ni-1. This sequence will always converge to one. For any starting number, N0, let K be the minimum value of i >= 0 for which N1 = 1. For example, if N0 = 31, then N1 = 5, N2 = 2, N3 = 1, so K = 3.

Given a range of consecutive numbers and a value of X how many numbers in the range have a K value equal to X?

Input
There will be several test cases in the input. Each test case will consist of three integers on a single line:
LO HI X
Where LO and HI (1 <= LO <= HI <= 10^18) are the lower and upper limits of a range of integers, and X (0 <= X <= 10) is the target value for K. The input will end with a line of three 0s.

Output
For each test case output a single integer, representing the number of integers in the range from LO to HI (inclusive) which have a K value equal to X in the input. Print each Integer on its own line with no spaces. Do not print any blank lines between answers.

Sample Input

31 31 3
31 31 1
27 31 1
27 31 2
1023 1025 1
1023 1025 2
0 0 0

Sample Output

1
0
0
3
1
1

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If you guys want I can include our answer or our problem, because finding for a small range is easy but I will give you a hint first your program needs to run in seconds not minutes. We had a successful solution but not an efficient algorithm to use a range similar to

48238 10^18 9

Anyway good luck and if the community likes these we had some more we could not solve that could be some good brain teasers for you guys. The competition allows you to use Python, C++, or Java—all three are acceptable in an answer.

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So as a hint my coach said to think of how binary numbers count rather than checking every bit. I think that gets us a lot closer.

Answer 1

I think a key is first understanding the pattern of K values and how rapidly it grows. Basically, you have:

K(1) = 0
K(X) = K(bitcount(X))+1 for X > 1

So finding the smallest X values for a given K we see

K(1) = 0
K(2) = 1
K(3) = 2
K(7) = 3
K(127) = 4
K(170141183460469231731687303715884105727) = 5

So for an example like 48238 10^18 9 the answer is trivially 0. K=0 only for 1, and K=1 only for powers of 2, so in the range of interest, we’ll pretty much only see K values of 2, 3 or 4, and never see K >= 5

edit

Ok, so we’re looking for an algorithm to count the number of values with K=2,3,4 in a range of value LO..HI without iterating over the entire range. So the first step is to find the number of values in the range with bitcount(x)==i for i = 1..59 (since we only care about values up to 10^18 and 10^18 < 2^60). So break down the range lo..hi into subranges that are a power of 2 size and differ only in their lower n bits — a range of the form x*(2^n)..(x+1)*(2^n)-1. We can break down the arbitray lo..hi range into such subranges easily. For each such subrange there will be choose(n, i) values with i+bitcount(x) set bits.
So we just add all the subranges together to get a vector of counts for 1..59, which we then iterate over, adding together those elements with the same K value to get our answer.

edit (fixed again to be be C89 compatible and work for lo=1/k=0)

Here’s a C program to do what I previously described:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <assert.h>

int bitcount(long long x) {
    int rv = 0;
    while(x) { rv++; x &= x-1; }
    return rv; }

long long choose(long long m, long long n) {
    long long rv = 1;
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
        rv *= m-i;
        rv /= i+1; }
    return rv; }

void bitcounts_p2range(long long *counts, long long base, int l2range) {
    int i;
    assert((base & ((1LL << l2range) - 1)) == 0);
    counts += bitcount(base);
    for (i = 0; i <= l2range; i++)
        counts[i] += choose(l2range, i); }

void bitcounts_range(long long *counts, long long lo, long long hi) {
    int l2range = 0;
    while (lo + (1LL << l2range) - 1 <= hi) {
        if (lo & (1LL << l2range)) {
            bitcounts_p2range(counts, lo, l2range);
            lo += 1LL << l2range; }
        l2range++; }
    while (l2range >= 0) {
        if (lo + (1LL << l2range) - 1 <= hi) {
            bitcounts_p2range(counts, lo, l2range);
            lo += 1LL << l2range; }
        l2range--; }
    assert(lo == hi+1); }

int K(int x) {
    int rv = 0;
    while(x > 1) {
        x = bitcount(x);
        rv++; }
    return rv; }

int main() {
    long long counts[64];
    long long lo, hi, total;
    int i, k;
    while (scanf("%lld%lld%d", &lo, &hi, &k) == 3) {
        if (lo < 1 || lo > hi || k < 0) break;
        if (lo == 0 || hi == 0 || k == 0) break;
        total = 0;
        if (lo == 1) {
            lo++;
            if (k == 0) total++; }
        memset(counts, 0, sizeof(counts));
        bitcounts_range(counts, lo, hi);
        for (i = 1; i < 64; i++)
            if (K(i)+1 == k)
                total += counts[i];
        printf("%lld\n", total); }
    return 0; }

which runs just fine for values up to 2^63-1 (LONGLONG_MAX).
For 48238 1000000000000000000 3 it gives 513162479025364957, which certainly seems plausible

edit

giving the inputs of

48238 1000000000000000000 1
48238 1000000000000000000 2
48238 1000000000000000000 3
48238 1000000000000000000 4

gives outputs of

44
87878254941659920
513162479025364957
398959266032926842

Those add up to 999999999999951763 which is correct. The value for k=1 is correct (there are 44 powers of two in that range 2^16 up to 2^59). So while I’m not sure the other 3 values are correct, they’re certainly plausible.