Ordered partitions

From Rosetta Code
Revision as of 14:45, 7 February 2011 by 91.4.78.20 (talk) (Create Page and add task description)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Task
Ordered partitions
You are encouraged to solve this task according to the task description, using any language you may know.

In this task we want to find the ordered partitions into fixed-size blocks.

partitions(arg1,arg2,...,argn) should generate all distributions of the elements in {1,...,sum{arg1,arg2,...,argn}} into #{arg1,arg2,...,argn} blocks of respective size arg1,arg2,...,argn.

E.g. partitions(2,0,2) would create:

{({1, 2}, {}, {3, 4}), ({1, 3}, {}, {2, 4}), ({1, 4}, {}, {2, 3}), 
 ({2, 3}, {}, {1, 4}), ({2, 4}, {}, {1, 3}), ({3, 4}, {}, {1, 2})}

E.g. partitions(1,1,1) would create:

{({1}, {2}, {3}), ({1}, {3}, {2}), ({2}, {1}, {3}), ({2}, {3}, {1}), 
 ({3}, {1}, {2}), ({3}, {2}, {1})}

Note that the number of elements in the list is

(arg1+arg2+...+argn choose arg1) * (arg2+arg3+...+argn choose arg2) * ... * (argn choose argn)

(i.e. the multinomial coefficient). Also, partitions(1,1,1) creates the permutations of {1,2,3} and thus there would be 3! = 6 elements in the list.

Note: Do not use functions that are not in the standard library of the programming language you use. Your file should be written so that it can be executed on the command line and by default outputs the result of partitions(2,0,2). If the programming language does not support polyvariadic functions pass a list as an argument.

Notation

Remarks on the used notation for the task in order to understand it easierly.

{1,...,n} denotes the set of consecutive numbers from 1 to n, e.g. {1,2,3} if n = 3. sum is the function that takes as its sole argument a set of natural numbers and computes the sum of the numbers, e.g. sum{1,2,3} = 6. arg1,arg2,...,argn are the arguments - natural numbers - that the sought function receives. The operator # returns the number of elements in a set, e.g. #{1,2,3} = 3. () is a tuple, e.g. (1,2,3).