Setup
Register for the lab using grinch
: https://grinch.caltech.edu/register and clone the repository as explained in the setup instructions.
Goals and Outcomes
By the end of this lab, you will…
- see how combinatorial game theory and programming intersect
- see how a computational model can be useful to study trade-offs
- get more comfortable with graphs (DAGS, in particular)
Pebbling Game
Given a DAG \(G\), we define a valid move in the pebbling game as either removing or adding a pebble according to the following rules:
- A pebble may be removed from a vertex at any time.
- A pebble may be placed on a vertex with in-degree 0 at any time.
- If all predecessors of an unpebbled vertex \(v\) are pebbled, a pebble may be placed on \(v\).
The “easiest” solution to this problem is to just add pebbles and never remove them. But what order should they be added in? This is exactly the topological sort problem from lecture.
public List<Integer> toposort()
Returns a List
of ids of PebblingNode
s in any valid topological sorted order.
Task 0.
Implement toposort
to solve the pebbling game. Note that the indegree
field is pre-populated for you.
We care about pebbling because it’s a model of a trade-off between space (each pebble represents a memory location) and time (the number of moves represents the time an algorithm takes).
Checking the Results on gitlab
Task 1. Check to make sure you are passing all the tests on gitlab.