Question

This is my first post, hope it complies with posting guidelines of the site.
First of all a generic thanks to all the community: reading you from some months and learned a lot :o)

Premise: I’m a first years student of IT.

Here’s the question: I’m looking for an efficient way to count the number of unique pairs (numbers that appear exactly twice) in a given positive int array (that’s all I know), e.g. if:

int[] arr = {1,4,7,1,5,7,4,1,5};

the number of unique pairs in arr is 3 (4,5,7).

I have some difficulties in… evaluating the efficiency of my proposals let’s say.

Here’s the first code I did:

int numCouples( int[] v ) {
int res = 0;
int count = 0;
for (int i = 0 ; i < v.length; i++){
    count = 0;
    for (int j = 0; j < v.length; j++){
        if (i != j && v[i] == v[j]){
            count++;
        }
    }
    if (count == 1){
        res++;
    }
}
return res/2;
}

This shoudn’t be good cause it checks the whole given array as many times as the number of elements in the given array… correct me if I’m wrong.

This is my second code:

int numCouples( int[] v) {
int n = 0;
int res = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < v.length; i++){
    if (v[i] > n){
        n = v[i];
    }
}
int[] a = new int [n];
for (int i = 0; i < v.length; i++){
    a[v[i]-1]++;
}
for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++){
    if (a[i] == 2){
        res++;
    }
}
return res;
}

I guess this should be better than the first one since it checks only 2 times the given array and 1 time the n array, when n is the max value of the given array. May be not so good if n is quite big I guess…

Well, 2 questions:

1. am I understanding good how to “measure” the efficiency of the code?

2. there’s a better way to count the number of unique pairs in a given array?

EDIT:
Damn I’ve just posted and I’m already swamped by answers! Thanks! I’ll study each one with care, for the time being I say I don’t get those involving HashMap: out of my knowledge yet (hence thanks again for the insight:o) )

Answer 1

Well, here’s another answer to your’s 2 questions:

am I understanding good how to "measure" the efficiency of the code?

There are various ways to measure efficiency of the code. First of all, people distinguish between memory efficiency and time efficiency. The usual way to count all these values is to know, how efficient are the building blocks of your algorithm. Have a look at the wiki.

For instance, sorting using quicksort would need n*log(n) operations. Iterating through the array would need just n operations, where n is number of elements in the input.

there's a better way to count the number of unique pairs in a given array?

Here’s another solution for you. The complixity of this one would be: O(n*log(n)+n), where O(...) is Big O notation.

import java.util.Arrays;

public class Ctest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    int[] a = new int[] { 1, 4, 7, 1, 7, 4, 1, 5, 5, 8 };
    System.out.println("RES: " + uniquePairs(a));
  }

  public static int uniquePairs(int[] a) {
    Arrays.sort(a);
    // now we have: [1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7]

    int res = 0;
    int len = a.length;
    int i = 0;

    while (i < len) {
      // take first number
      int num = a[i];
      int c = 1;
      i++;

      // count all duplicates
      while(i < len && a[i] == num) {
        c++;
        i++;
      }
      System.out.println("Number: " + num + "\tCount: "+c);
      // if we spotted number just 2 times, increment result
      if (c == 2) {
        res++;
      }
    }

    return res;
  }
}