Effective ways to represent logical expression - boolean

I am writing a console program to represent logical expressions( something likes AB'C + A'C) so that I can be simplify( optimize) the expressions and evaluate their values. I tried to use string to represent an expression, but in this way, I can only evaluate its value base on input values, but optimize an expression that represented as string is very difficult( with me), Example, ABC + AB can be AB because ABC+AB = AB(C+1) = AB. I have also think another way it is using vector of vector of literal. Example, AB'C + AB + BC will be represent as below figure:
Explaining: Each column is represent for each term, in above example. The first column represents for AB'C, the second one represents for AB and the third one represents for BC'.
I think it is a good way to present logical expression but I still can not find a way to optimize an expression that repression by this way. I also googled but I did not find sample project for the problem.
In short, I hope someone suggest to me a way to represent, evaluate and optimize an logical expression easier. Thank in advance!

How to represent, evaluate and optimize a logical expression?
To represent this you need to use an expression tree and since you are using only logic operators that are binary operators you want to use a binary expression tree or more specifically this.
To simplify the tree you use the laws of Boolean algebra.
If all of the values are bound, then through the process of simplification the tree will simplify to a root node with either true or false.
For some example code I checked Rosetta Code but they had no task for evaluating Boolean expressions. The closest task is arithmetic evaluation.

Related

Why are sum of minterms equated to 1 and product of maxterms to 0?

I have learnt that to convert an expression in the form of a Truth Table to a Sum of Product expressions, we use the concept of minterms. After preparing the truth table we find out which products evaluate to 1 and add those products.
While in the case of Product of Sum expression, we take those sums that evaluate to 0 and take the product of those sums.
I could not understand the logic behind this taking of 0 and 1. In an answer I read here, I found that POS is considered as a negative logic. I could not understand the concept behind it. What is the real logic behind this?
This is something I was confused with as well. When we write the truth table and see for which cases the value of F evaluates to 1, we get multiple cases. In SOP, ANY of those minterms can be true and the whole Function would be 1 because 1+X=1 This is the intuition behind SOP being positive logic and hence automatically, its complement, POS being negative logic.
Check out this answer for further clarification.
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2794909/boolean-algebra-sum-of-products-and-product-of-sums-why-is-the-procedure-def#

Use Sum Indexed and Lambdify, and scipy to minimize a large expression

I have a huge expression around 231 terms and each of these expressions has some power of cos(e) or sin(e) and they can be mixed as well, each term also has an r(distance) term in the denominator raised to some power as well.
Here is a small portion of the expression
What I'd like to do is sum the expression over all angle e's and then over all r's and use lambdify and scipy to minimize the expression with respect to 4 other parameters present in the equation.
Things I tried
I have tried to do the sums using sum indexed in scipy but am not
able to make it work, the power bit is tricky also once I have the
sum indexed expression and I expand it how do i pass the list of
angle values at which to calculate the expression
Also since the expression is pretty large I'd like to do the sum indexing etc. in a loop without individually resolving expression for each power.
(If my question is not clear, let me know.)
This is how I finally managed to solve my problem -
Replaced cos(e) and sin(e) with variable cose and sine.
Iterated over the list of angles and used sympy.subs to replace cose and sine with math.cos(e) and math.sin(e) and kept adding the expressions obtained ditto for r as well.
This left me with only p1 and p2 and Q1 and Q2 which was required.
I couldnt use sympy lambdify and sum indexed but this got the job done.

Simplifying a 9 variable boolean expression

I am trying to create a tic-tac-toe program as a mental exercise and I have the board states stored as booleans like so:
http://i.imgur.com/xBiuoAO.png
I would like to simplify this boolean expression...
(a&b&c) | (d&e&f) | (g&h&i) | (a&d&g) | (b&e&h) | (c&f&i) | (a&e&i) | (g&e&c)
My first thoughts were to use a Karnaugh Map but there were no solvers online that supported 9 variables.
and heres the question:
First of all, how would I know if a boolean condition is already as simple as possible?
and second: What is the above boolean condition simplified?
2. Simplified condition:
The original expression
a&b&c|d&e&f|g&h&i|a&d&g|b&e&h|c&f&i|a&e&i|g&e&c
can be simplified to the following, knowing that & is more prioritary than |
e&(d&f|b&h|a&i|g&c)|a&(b&c|d&g)|i&(g&h|c&f)
which is 4 chars shorter, performs in the worst case 18 & and | evaluations (the original one counted 23)
There is no shorter boolean formula (see point below). If you switch to matrices, maybe you can find another solution.
1. Making sure we got the smallest formula
Normally, it is very hard to find the smallest formula. See this recent paper if you are more interested. But in our case, there is a simple proof.
We will reason about a formula being the smallest with respect to the formula size, where for a variable a, size(a)=1, for a boolean operation size(A&B) = size(A|B) = size(A) + 1 + size(B), and for negation size(!A) = size(A) (thus we can suppose that we have Negation Normal Form at no cost).
With respect to that size, our formula has size 37.
The proof that you cannot do better consists in first remarking that there are 8 rows to check, and that there is always a pair of letter distinguishing 2 different rows. Since we can regroup these 8 checks in no less than 3 conjuncts with the remaining variable, the number of variables in the final formula should be at least 8*2+3 = 19, from which we can deduce the minimal tree size.
Detailed proof
Let us suppose that a given formula F is the smallest and in NNF format.
F cannot contain negated variables like !a. For that, remark that F should be monotonic, that is, if it returns "true" (there is a winning row), then changing one of the variables from false to true should not change that result. According to Wikipedia, F can be written without negation. Even better, we can prove that we can remove the negation. Following this answer, we could convert back and from DNF format, removing negated variables in the middle or replacing them by true.
F cannot contain a sub-tree like a disjunction of two variables a|b.
For this formula to be useful and not exchangeable with either a or b, it would mean that there are contradicting assignments such that for example
F[a|b] = true and F[a] = false, therefore that a = false and b = true because of monotonicity. Also, in this case, turning b to false makes the whole formula false because false = F[a] = F[a|false] >= F[a|b](b = false).
Therefore there is a row passing by b which is the cause of the truth, and it cannot go through a, hence for example e = true and h = true.
And the checking of this row passes by the expression a|b for testing b. However, it means that with a,e,h being true and all other set to false, F is still true, which contradicts the purpose of the formula.
Every subtree looking like a&b checks a unique row. So the last letter should appear just above the corresponding disjunction (a&b|...)&{c somewhere for sure here}, or this leaf is useless and either a or b can be removed safely. Indeed, suppose that c does not appear above, and the game is where a&b&c is true and all other variables are false. Then the expression where c is supposed to be above returns false, so a&b will be always useless. So there is a shorter expression by removing a&b.
There are 8 independent branches, so there is at least 8 subtrees of type a&b. We cannot regroup them using a disjunction of 2 conjunctions since a, f and h never share the same rows, so there must be 3 outer variables. 8*2+3 makes 19 variables appear in the final formula.
A tree with 19 variables cannot have less than 18 operators, so in total the size have to be at least 19+18 = 37.
You can have variants of the above formula.
QED.
One option is doing the Karnaugh map manually. Since you have 9 variables, that makes for a 2^4 by 2^5 grid, which is rather large, and by the looks of the equation, probably not very interesting either.
By inspection, it doesn't look like a Karnaugh map will give you any useful information (Karnaugh maps basically reduce expressions such as ((!a)&b) | (a&b) into b), so in that sense of simplification, your expression is already as simple as it can get. But if you want to reduce the number of computations, you can factor out a few variables using the distributivity of the AND operators over ORs.
The best way to think of this is how a person would think of it. No person would say to themselves, "a and b and c, or if d and e and f," etc. They would say "Any three in a row, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally."
Also, instead of doing eight checks (3 rows, 3 columns, and 2 diagonals), you can do just four checks (three rows and one diagonal), then rotate the board 90 degrees, then do the same checks again.
Here's what you end up with. These functions all assume that the board is a three-by-three matrix of booleans, where true represents a winning symbol, and false represents a not-winning symbol.
def win?(board)
winning_row_or_diagonal?(board) ||
winning_row_or_diagonal?(rotate_90(board))
end
def winning_row_or_diagonal?(board)
winning_row?(board) || winning_diagonal?(board)
end
def winning_row?(board)
3.times.any? do |row_number|
three_in_a_row?(board, row_number, 0, 1, 0)
end
end
def winning_diagonal?(board)
three_in_a_row?(board, 0, 0, 1, 1)
end
def three_in_a_row?(board, x, y, delta_x, delta_y)
3.times.all? do |i|
board[x + i * delta_x][y + i * deltay]
end
end
def rotate_90(board)
board.transpose.map(&:reverse)
end
The matrix rotate is from here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3571501/238886
Although this code is quite a bit more verbose, each function is clear in its intent. Rather than a long boolean expresion, the code now expresses the rules of tic-tac-toe.
You know it's a simple as possible when there are no common sub-terms to extract (e.g. if you had "a&b" in two different trios).
You know your tic tac toe solution must already be as simple as possible because any pair of boxes can belong to at most only one winning line (only one straight line can pass through two given points), so (a & b) can't be reused in any other win you're checking for.
(Also, "simple" can mean a lot of things; specifying what you mean may help you answer your own question. )

Why asterisk is overloaded for types?

I still don't understand the motivation.
Why did they made two different operators (* and *.) for multiplication of integers and floats respectively as if they afraid of overloading, but at the same time they used * to denote Cartesian product of types?
type a = int * int ;;
Why suddenly they became so brave? Why not to write
type a = int *.. int ;;
or something?
Is there some relation, which makes Cartesian product closer to integer product and more far from float product?
It's not overloaded, on the right hand-side of type t = you are defining another kind of concept, you are defining a type, not a value.
In ML-like languages you can see two distinct language:
The language for types that allows you to define types (a specification of the structure of your values).
The language for values that allows you to define values (actual values corresponding to a type, functions are also values). That's what gets evaluated.
Since the domain of the two language are really separate there's no theoretical problem/ambiguity in reusing similar syntactic construct in each language and hence has absolutely nothing to do with overloading.
In mathematics, you note cartesian product using the multiplication character. So it is logic to note it the same way in OCaml...

Where can I find a cheat sheet for hungarian notation?

I'm working on a legacy COM C++ project that makes use of system hungarian notation. Because it's maintenance of legacy code, the convention is to code in the original style it was written in - our newer code isn't coded this way. So I'm not interested in changing that standard or having a a discussion of our past sins =)
Is there an online cheat-sheet available out there for systems hungarian notation?
The best I can find thus far is a pre stack-overflow discussion post, but it doesn't quite have everything I've needed in the past. Does anyone have any other links?
(making this community wiki in the hope this becomes a self populating list)
If this is for a legacy COM project, you'll probably want to follow Microsoft's Hungarian Notation specifications, which are documented on MSDN.
Note that this is Apps Hungarian, i.e. the "good" kind of Hungarian Notation. Systems Hungarian is the "bad" kind, where names are prefixed with their compiler types, e.g. i for int.
Tables from the MSDN article
Table 1. Some examples for procedure names
Name Description
InitSy Takes an sy as its argument and initializes it.
OpenFn fn is the argument. The procedure will "open" the fn. No value is returned.
FcFromBnRn Returns the fc corresponding to the bn,rn pair given. (The names cannot tell us what the types sy, fn, fc, and so on, are.)
The following is a list of standard type constructions. (X and Y stand for arbitrary tags. According to standard punctuation, the actual tags are lowercase.)
Table 2. Standard type constructions
pX Pointer to X.
dX Difference between two instances of type X. X + dX is of type X.
cX Count of instances of type X.
mpXY An array of Ys indexed by X. Read as "map from X to Y."
rgX An array of Xs. Read as "range X." The indices of the array are called:
iX index of the array rgX.
dnX (rare) An array indexed by type X. The elements of the array are called:
eX (rare) Element of the array dnX.
grpX A group of Xs stored one after another in storage. Used when the X elements are of variable size and standard array indexing would not apply. Elements of the group must be referenced by means other then direct indexing. A storage allocation zone, for example, is a grp of blocks.
bX Relative offset to a type X. This is used for field displacements in a data structure with variable size fields. The offset may be given in terms of bytes or words, depending on the base pointer from which the offset is measured.
cbX Size of instances of X in bytes.
cwX Size of instances of X in words.
The following are standard qualifiers. (The letter X stands for any type tag. Actual type tags are in lowercase.)
Table 3. Standard qualifiers
XFirst The first element in an ordered set (interval) of X values.
XLast The last element in an ordered set of X values. XLast is the upper limit of a closed interval, hence the loop continuation condition should be: X <= XLast.
XLim The strict upper limit of an ordered set of X values. Loop continuation should be: X < XLim.
XMax Strict upper limit for all X values (excepting Max, Mac, and Nil) for all other X: X < XMax. If X values start with X=0, XMax is equal to the number of different X values. The allocated length of a dnx vector, for example, will be typically XMax.
XMac The current (as opposed to constant or allocated) upper limit for all X values. If X values start with 0, XMac is the current number of X values. To iterate through a dnx array, for example:
for x=0 step 1 to xMac-1 do ... dnx[x] ...
or
for ix=0 step 1 to ixMac-1 do ... rgx[ix] ...
XNil A distinguished Nil value of type X. The value may or may not be 0 or -1.
XT Temporary X. An easy way to qualify the second quantity of a given type in a scope.
Table 4. Some common primitive types
f Flag (Boolean, logical). If qualifier is used, it should describe the true state of the flag. Exception: the constants fTrue and fFalse.
w Word with arbitrary contents.
ch Character, usually in ASCII text.
b Byte, not necessarily holding a coded character, more akin to w. Distinguished from the b constructor by the capital letter of the qualifier in immediately following.
sz Pointer to first character of a zero terminated string.
st Pointer to a string. First byte is the count of characters cch.
h pp (in heap).
Here's one for 'Systems Hungarian', which in my experience was the more commonly used (and less useful):
http://web.mst.edu/~cpp/common/hungarian.html
But how universally followed this is, I have no idea.
The other form of Hungarian Notation is "Apps Hungarian", which apparently is Simonyi's original intent (the use of the variable was encoded rather than the type). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation for some details.
Because this is a legacy project, your software department manager should have a copy of the style guide for whatever version of Hungarian Notation the original programmers used. (I'm assuming that the original programmers have long since fled to more enlightened workplaces.)
You really should reconsider your use of Hungarian notation. It was originally a patch for the lack of strong typing (and compiler type-checking) in C. Modern compilers enforce type-correctness, making Hungarian notation redundant at best, and erroneous otherwise.
There doesn't seem to be any one exhaustive resource for looking up Hungarian Notation prefixes, probably because a lot of it varied from code base to code base. There, of course, were a lot of very commonly used ones.
The best list I could find was here
The rest cover the commonly used conventions such as this entry
MSDN's enty on Hungarian Notation is here
and a couple of short papers on the subject (overlapping each other perhaps) here and here
Your best bet would be to see how the variables are used and that (may) help you figure out the definition of the prefixes (though in practice the naming rarey reflected the use of the variable, sadly).
You might be able to piece together some semblance of notation from those various links.
Just to be complete(!) how about Hungarian Object Notation for Visual Basic from Microsoft Support no less.