Average of 3 long integers

Question

I have 3 very large signed integers.

long x = long.MaxValue;
long y = long.MaxValue - 1;
long z = long.MaxValue - 2;

I want to calculate th

Answer 1

You could use the fact that you can write each of the numbers as y = ax + b, where x is a constant. Each a would be y / x (the integer part of that division). Each b would be y % x (the rest/modulo of that division). If you choose this constant in an intelligent way, for example by choosing the square root of the maximum number as a constant, you can get the average of x numbers without having problems with overflow.

The average of an arbitrary list of numbers can be found by finding:

( ( sum( all A's ) / length ) * constant ) + 
( ( sum( all A's ) % length ) * constant / length) +
( ( sum( all B's ) / length )

where % denotes modulo and / denotes the 'whole' part of division.

The program would look something like:

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        List list = new List();
        list.Add( long.MaxValue );
        list.Add( long.MaxValue - 1 );
        list.Add( long.MaxValue - 2 );

        long sumA = 0, sumB = 0;
        long res1, res2, res3;
        //You should calculate the following dynamically
        long constant = 1753413056;

        foreach (long num in list)
        {
            sumA += num / constant;
            sumB += num % constant;
        }

        res1 = (sumA / list.Count) * constant;
        res2 = ((sumA % list.Count) * constant) / list.Count;
        res3 = sumB / list.Count;

        Console.WriteLine( res1 + res2 + res3 );
    }
}