Algorithms: Customization Binary Search

I had some interviews into big companies like Google, Amazon and so on, and there were tasks related to the algorithms. So, Here I’ll describe one of the tasks and publish code for this algorithm. Note, during interview you can chose algorithm by your self and time for implementation (runtime implementation) about 30 mins…..

Predefined: There is dictionary of words with unspecified size, we just know that all words in dictionary are sorted (for example by alphabet). Also we have just a one method

String getWord(int index) throws IndexOutOfBoundsException

Needs: Need to develop algorithm to find some input word in dictionary using java. For this we should implement method

public boolean isWordInTheDictionary(String word)

Limitations: We cannot change the internal structure of dictionary, we have no access to internal structure, we do not know counts of elements in dictionary.

Issues: I have developed modified-binary search, But you can try to implement interpolation search or modification interpolation + binary 🙂 .

So, my code :

public class Dictionary {
    private static final int BIGGEST_TOP_MASK = 0xF00000;
    private static final int LESS_TOP_MASK = 0x0F0000;
    private static final int FULL_MASK = 0xFFFFFF;
    private String[] data;
    private static final int STEP = 100; // for real test step should be Integer.MAX_VALUE
    private int shiftIndex = -1;
    private static final int LESS_MASK = 0x0000FF;
    private static final int BIG_MASK = 0x00FF00;

    public Dictionary() {
        data = getData();
    }

    String getWord(int index) throws IndexOutOfBoundsException {
        return data[index];
    }

    public String[] getData() {
        return new String[]{"a", "aaaa", "asss", "az", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "test", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z"};
    }

    public boolean isWordInTheDictionary(String word) {
        boolean isFound = false;
        int constantIndex = STEP; // predefined step
        int flag = 0;
        int i = 0;
        while (true) {
            i++;
            if (flag == FULL_MASK) {
                System.out.println("Word is not found ... Steps " + i);
                break;
            }
            try {
                String data = getWord(constantIndex);
                if (null != data) {
                    int compareResult = word.compareTo(data);
                    if (compareResult > 0) {
                        if ((flag & LESS_MASK) == LESS_MASK) {
                            constantIndex = prepareIndex(false, constantIndex);
                            if (shiftIndex == 1)
                                flag |= BIGGEST_TOP_MASK;
                        } else {
                            constantIndex = constantIndex * 2;
                        }
                        flag |= BIG_MASK;

                    } else if (compareResult < 0) {
                        if ((flag & BIG_MASK) == BIG_MASK) {
                            constantIndex = prepareIndex(true, constantIndex);
                            if (shiftIndex == 1)
                                flag |= LESS_TOP_MASK;
                        } else {
                            constantIndex = constantIndex / 2;
                        }
                        flag |= LESS_MASK;
                    } else {
                       // YES!!! We found word.
                        isFound = true;
                        System.out.println("Steps " + i);
                        break;
                    }
                }
            } catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
                if (flag > 0) {
                    constantIndex = prepareIndex(true, constantIndex);
                    flag |= LESS_MASK;
                } else constantIndex = constantIndex / 2;
            }
        }
        return isFound;
    }

    private int prepareIndex(boolean isBiggest, int constantIndex) {
        shiftIndex = (int) Math.ceil(getIndex(shiftIndex == -1 ? constantIndex : shiftIndex));
        if (isBiggest)
            constantIndex = constantIndex - shiftIndex;
        else
            constantIndex = constantIndex + shiftIndex;
        return constantIndex;
    }

    private double getIndex(double constantIndex) {
        if (constantIndex <= 1)
            return 1;
        return constantIndex / 2;
    }
}

I hope this post will help some one to pass interview into the biggest companies 🙂

Cheers!