Create given string from dictionary entries
You can easily create a case where program takes at least exponential time to complete. Let's just take a word aaa...aaab
, where a
is repeated n
times. Dictionary will contain only two words, a
and aa
.
b
in the end ensure that function never finds a match and thus never exits prematurely.
On each words
execution, two recursive calls will be spawned: with suffix(s, 1)
and suffix(s, 2)
. Execution time, therefore, grows like fibonacci numbers: t(n) = t(n - 1) + t(n - 2)
. (You can verify it by inserting a counter.) So, complexity is certainly not polynomial. (and this is not even the worst possible input)
But you can easily improve your solution with Memoization. Notice, that output of function words
depends on one thing only: at which position in original string we're starting. E.e., if we have a string abcdefg
and words(5)
is called, it doesn't matter how exactly abcde
is composed (as ab+c+de
or a+b+c+d+e
or something else). Thus, we don't have to recalculate words("fg")
each time.
In the primitive version, this can be done like this
public static boolean words(String s, Set<String> dictionary) {
if (processed.contains(s)) {
// we've already processed string 's' with no luck
return false;
}
// your normal computations
// ...
// if no match found, add 's' to the list of checked inputs
processed.add(s);
return false;
}
PS Still, I do encourage you to change words(String)
to words(int)
. This way you'll be able to store results in array and even transform the whole algorithm to DP (which would make it much simpler).
edit 2
Since I have not much to do besides work, here's the DP (dynamic programming) solution. Same idea as above.
String s = "peachpie1";
int n = s.length();
boolean[] a = new boolean[n + 1];
// a[i] tells whether s[i..n-1] can be composed from words in the dictionary
a[n] = true; // always can compose empty string
for (int start = n - 1; start >= 0; --start) {
for (String word : dictionary) {
if (start + word.length() <= n && a[start + word.length()]) {
// check if 'word' is a prefix of s[start..n-1]
String test = s.substring(start, start + word.length());
if (test.equals(word)) {
a[start] = true;
break;
}
}
}
}
System.out.println(a[0]);