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

I think the solution is to combine techniques from video encoding, namely the discrete cosine transformation. In digital video, rather recording the changing the brightness or colour of video as regular values such as 110 112 115 116, each is subtracted from the last (similar to run length encoding). 110 112 115 116 becomes 110 2 3 1. The values, 2 3 1 require less bits than the originals.

So lets say we create a list of the input values as they arrive on the socket. We are storing in each element, not the value, but the offset of the one before it. We sort as we go, so the offsets are only going to be positive. But the offset could be 8 decimal digits wide which this fits in 3 bytes. Each element can't be 3 bytes, so we need to pack these. We could use the top bit of each byte as a "continue bit", indicating that the next byte is part of the number and the lower 7 bits of each byte need to be combined. zero is valid for duplicates.

As the list fills up, the numbers should be get closer together, meaning on average only 1 byte is used to determine the distance to the next value. 7 bits of value and 1 bit of offset if convenient, but there may be a sweet spot that requires less than 8 bits for a "continue" value.

Anyway, I did some experiment. I use a random number generator and I can fit a million sorted 8 digit decimal numbers into about 1279000 bytes. The average space between each number is consistently 99...

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        // 1 million values
        int[] values = new int[1000000];

        // create random values up to 8 digits lrong
        Random random = new Random();
        for (int x=0;x> 7;
            os.write(value == 0 ? b : (b | 0x80));
        } while (value != 0);
    }
}