Suppose you are consulting for a bank that’s concerned about fraud detection, and they come to you with the following problem. They have a collection of n bank cards that they’ve confiscated, suspecting them of being used in fraud. Each bank card is a small plastic object, containing a magnetic stripe with some encrypted data, and it corresponds to a unique account in the bank. Each account can have many bank cards corresponding to it, and we’ll say that two bank cards are equivalent if they correspond to the same account. It’s very difficult to read the account number off a bank card directly, but the bank has a high-tech “equivalence tester” that takes two bank cards and, after performing some computations, determines whether they are equivalent. Their question is the following: among the collection of n cards, is there a set of more than n/2 of them that are all equivalent to one another? Assume that the only feasible operations you can do with the cards are to pick two of them and plug them in to the equivalence tester. Show how to decide the answer to their questions with only O(n log n) invocations of the equivalence tester.
Also can someone point me to where i can get additional problems? Thanks --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Algorithm Geeks" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/algogeeks -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
