divide list in two parts that their sum closest to each other

Question

This is a hard algorithms problem that :

Divide the list in 2 parts (sum) that their sum closest to (most) each other

list length is 1 <

Answer 1

This problem is at least as hard as the NP-complete problem subset sum. Your algorithm is a greedy algorithm. This type of algorithm is fast, and can generate an approximate solution quickly but it cannot find the exact solution to an NP-complete problem.

A brute force approach is probably the simplest way to solve your problem, although it is will be to slow if there are too many elements.

• Try every possible way of partitioning the elements into two sets and calculate the absolute difference in the sums.
• Choose the partition for which the absolute difference is minimal.

Generating all the partitions can be done by considering the binary representation of each integer from 0 to 2^n, where each binary digit determines whether the correspending element is in the left or right partition.