Sorting 1 million 8-decimal-digit numbers with 1 MB of RAM

Question

I have a computer with 1 MB of RAM and no other local storage. I must use it to accept 1 million 8-digit decimal numbers over a TCP connection, sort them, and then send the

Answer 1

(My original answer was wrong, sorry for the bad math, see below the break.)

How about this?

The first 27 bits store the lowest number you have seen, then the difference to the next number seen, encoded as follows: 5 bits to store the number of bits used in storing the difference, then the difference. Use 00000 to indicate that you saw that number again.

This works because as more numbers are inserted, the average difference between numbers goes down, so you use less bits to store the difference as you add more numbers. I believe this is called a delta list.

The worst case I can think of is all numbers evenly spaced (by 100), e.g. Assuming 0 is the first number:

000000000000000000000000000 00111 1100100
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                            a million times

27 + 1,000,000 * (5+7) bits = ~ 427k

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Reddit to the rescue!

If all you had to do was sort them, this problem would be easy. It takes 122k (1 million bits) to store which numbers you have seen (0th bit on if 0 was seen, 2300th bit on if 2300 was seen, etc.

You read the numbers, store them in the bit field, and then shift the bits out while keeping a count.

BUT, you have to remember how many you have seen. I was inspired by the sublist answer above to come up with this scheme:

Instead of using one bit, use either 2 or 27 bits:

• 00 means you did not see the number.
• 01 means you saw it once
• 1 means you saw it, and the next 26 bits are the count of how many times.

I think this works: if there are no duplicates, you have a 244k list. In the worst case you see each number twice (if you see one number three times, it shortens the rest of the list for you), that means you have seen 50,000 more than once, and you have seen 950,000 items 0 or 1 times.

50,000 * 27 + 950,000 * 2 = 396.7k.

You can make further improvements if you use the following encoding:

0 means you did not see the number 10 means you saw it once 11 is how you keep count

Which will, on average, result in 280.7k of storage.

EDIT: my Sunday morning math was wrong.

The worst case is we see 500,000 numbers twice, so the math becomes:

500,000 *27 + 500,000 *2 = 1.77M

The alternate encoding results in an average storage of

500,000 * 27 + 500,000 = 1.70M

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