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The shortest string containing all given substrings

asked 5 years ago

Jaakko Seppälä gravatar image

updated 5 years ago

I found a problem from https://www.ohjelmointiputka.net/post... . An English translation goes like this:

A person wants to learn playing tuba. His neigbours get angry for the noise so he tries to find a song that contains as few tunes as possible that he is able to play all four or less tune combinations. The tunes are c, d, e, f, g, a, and h. Output the minimal song.

I tried a code from https://artofproblemsolving.com/commu... .

def de_bruijn(k, n):
    """
    de Bruijn sequence for alphabet k
    and subsequences of length n.
    """
    alphabet = k
    k = len(k)

    a = [0] * k * n
    sequence = []

    def db(t, p):
        if t > n:
            if n % p == 0:
                sequence.extend(a[1:p + 1])
        else:
            a[t] = a[t - p]
            db(t + 1, p)
            for j in range(a[t - p] + 1, k):
                a[t] = j
                db(t + 1, t)
    db(1, 1)
    return "".join(alphabet[i] for i in sequence)

seq = de_bruijn("cdefgah", 4)
print(seq)

But the validator on the site says that hccc is missing.

So, how can I use Sagemath to solve the problem that if a set contains letters a, c, d, e, f, g, h, how to find the shortest string containing all one to four letter long substrings?

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Comments

If you want a Sagemath solution, there is http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/refer.... You would have to translate the numbers 1, 2, ..., 7 to the letters a, c, d, ... h, but that should be easy.

John Palmieri gravatar imageJohn Palmieri ( 5 years ago )

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answered 5 years ago

nbruin gravatar image

updated 5 years ago

The program doesn't use any sage-specific functionality, and it doesn't have to. You can just use any correct python implementation. The routine presented seems like a verbatim copy of the one on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brui... . Note that the definition of a "de bruijn sequence" includes it's a cyclic sequence. So you should be appending the head of the sequence to the tail:

"hccc" in seq+seq[:3]
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Asked: 5 years ago

Seen: 454 times

Last updated: Aug 08 '19