Integer types in SystemVerilog, as in most languages, wrap around on overflow. I was wondering if this is also true in constraints. For example:
class Test;
rand bit [3:0] a;
rand bit [3:0] b;
constraint c { a + b <= 4'h6; }
endclass;
When randomizing an object of this class, is it possible to get a solution where a == 7 and b == 12, which would satisfy the constraint since 7 + 12 = 19 which wraps around to 3, and 3 is less than 6?
If so, would it help to formulate the constraint as
constraint c { a + b <= 6; }
where 6 is a 32-bit signed int and the sum is forced to be calculated with 32-bit precision? (This of course is not a solution if the random variables are of type int)
You are correct. Expression evaluation is identical whether you are inside a constraint or not. In addition to overflow, you also need to be concerned about truncation and sign conversion. Integral expressions are weakly typed in SystemVerilog.
Related
This seems like such a simple problem, but I can't find a simple way to represent this in MiniZinc.
include "globals.mzn";
int: target;
int: max_length;
var 1..max_length: length;
array[1..length] of int: t;
constraint sum(t) = target;
constraint alldifferent(t);
solve minimize length;
This program errors with:
MiniZinc: type error: type-inst must be par set but is ``var set of int'
Is there a clean/simple way to represent this problem in MiniZinc?
Arrays in MiniZinc have a fixed size. The compiler is therefore saying that array[1..length] of int: t is not allowed, because length is a variable.
The alternative that MiniZinc offers is arrays with optional types, these are values that might exist. This means that when you write something like [t | t in 1..length], it will actually give you an array of 1..maxlength, but some elements can be marked as absent/<>.
For this particular problem you are also overlooking the fact that t should itself be a array of variables. The values of t are not yet known when at compile-time. A better way to formulate this problem would thus be to allow the values of t to be 0 when they are beyond the chosen length:
include "globals.mzn";
int: target;
int: max_length;
var 1..max_length: length;
array[1..max_length] of var int: t;
constraint sum(t) = target;
constraint alldifferent_except_0(t);
constraint forall(i in length+1..max_length) (t[i] = 0);
solve minimize length;
The next step to improve the model would be to ensure that the initial domain of t makes sense and instead of being all different, forcing an ordering would be equivalent, but eliminate some symmetry in the possible solutions.
Our professor said that in computer logic it's important when you add a number to another so a+b and b+a are not always equal.
Though,I couldn't find an example of when they would be different and why they won't be equal.
I think it would have to do something with bits but then again ,I'm not sure.
Although you don't share a lot of context it sounds as if your professor did not elaborate on that or you missed something.
In the case that he was talking about logic in general, he could have meant that the behavior of the + operator depends on how you define it.
Example: The definition (+) a b := if (a==0) then 5 else 0 results in a + operator which is not associative, e.g. 1 + 0 would be 0 but 0 + 1 would be 5. There are many programming languages that allow this redefinition (overwriting) of standard operators.
But with the context you share, this is all speculative.
One obscure possibility is if one or other of a or b is a high-definition timer value - ticks since program start.
Due to the cpu cycle(s) consumed to pop one of the values before addition, it's possible the sum could be different dependant on the order.
One more possibility is if a and b are expressions with side effects. E.g.
int x = 0;
int a() {
x += 1;
return x;
}
int b() {
return x;
}
a() + b() will return 2 and b() + a() will return 1 (both from initial state).
Or it could be that a or b are NaN, in which case even a == a is false. Though this one isn't connected with "when you add a number to another".
class Base
rand bit b;
// constraint c1 { every 5th randomization should have b =0;}
endclass
I know I can make a static count variable and update that count variable and then, in constraint I can check if count%5 is zero, then make b=0, but is there a better way to do that? Thanks.
There's no need to make count static, just non-random.
class Base;
rand bit b;
int count;
constraint c1 { count%5 -> b==0;}
function post_randomize();
count++;
endfunction
endclass
If you know the upper limit of b, then you can write a constraint like follow.
constraint abc
{
b dist {0:=20, 1:=80}
}
This will make weight of 0 to 20 and, weight of 1 to 80. So in this way, 0 will occur once in every 5 randomization.
The problem in general:
I have a big 2d point space, sparsely populated with dots.
Think of it as a big white canvas sprinkled with black dots.
I have to iterate over and search through these dots a lot.
The Canvas (point space) can be huge, bordering on the limits
of int and its size is unknown before setting points in there.
That brought me to the idea of hashing:
Ideal:
I need a hash function taking a 2D point, returning a unique uint32.
So that no collisions can occur. You can assume that the number of
dots on the Canvas is easily countable by uint32.
IMPORTANT: It is impossible to know the size of the canvas beforehand
(it may even change),
so things like
canvaswidth * y + x
are sadly out of the question.
I also tried a very naive
abs(x) + abs(y)
but that produces too many collisions.
Compromise:
A hash function that provides keys with a very low probability of collision.
Cantor's enumeration of pairs
n = ((x + y)*(x + y + 1)/2) + y
might be interesting, as it's closest to your original canvaswidth * y + x but will work for any x or y. But for a real world int32 hash, rather than a mapping of pairs of integers to integers, you're probably better off with a bit manipulation such as Bob Jenkin's mix and calling that with x,y and a salt.
a hash function that is GUARANTEED collision-free is not a hash function :)
Instead of using a hash function, you could consider using binary space partition trees (BSPs) or XY-trees (closely related).
If you want to hash two uint32's into one uint32, do not use things like Y & 0xFFFF because that discards half of the bits. Do something like
(x * 0x1f1f1f1f) ^ y
(you need to transform one of the variables first to make sure the hash function is not commutative)
Like Emil, but handles 16-bit overflows in x in a way that produces fewer collisions, and takes fewer instructions to compute:
hash = ( y << 16 ) ^ x;
You can recursively divide your XY plane into cells, then divide these cells into sub-cells, etc.
Gustavo Niemeyer invented in 2008 his Geohash geocoding system.
Amazon's open source Geo Library computes the hash for any longitude-latitude coordinate. The resulting Geohash value is a 63 bit number. The probability of collision depends of the hash's resolution: if two objects are closer than the intrinsic resolution, the calculated hash will be identical.
Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/mobile/geo-library-for-amazon-dynamodb-part-1-table-structure/
https://github.com/awslabs/dynamodb-geo
Your "ideal" is impossible.
You want a mapping (x, y) -> i where x, y, and i are all 32-bit quantities, which is guaranteed not to generate duplicate values of i.
Here's why: suppose there is a function hash() so that hash(x, y) gives different integer values. There are 2^32 (about 4 billion) values for x, and 2^32 values of y. So hash(x, y) has 2^64 (about 16 million trillion) possible results. But there are only 2^32 possible values in a 32-bit int, so the result of hash() won't fit in a 32-bit int.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_argument
Generally, you should always design your data structures to deal with collisions. (Unless your hashes are very long (at least 128 bit), very good (use cryptographic hash functions), and you're feeling lucky).
Perhaps?
hash = ((y & 0xFFFF) << 16) | (x & 0xFFFF);
Works as long as x and y can be stored as 16 bit integers. No idea about how many collisions this causes for larger integers, though. One idea might be to still use this scheme but combine it with a compression scheme, such as taking the modulus of 2^16.
If you can do a = ((y & 0xffff) << 16) | (x & 0xffff) then you could afterward apply a reversible 32-bit mix to a, such as Thomas Wang's
uint32_t hash( uint32_t a)
a = (a ^ 61) ^ (a >> 16);
a = a + (a << 3);
a = a ^ (a >> 4);
a = a * 0x27d4eb2d;
a = a ^ (a >> 15);
return a;
}
That way you get a random-looking result rather than high bits from one dimension and low bits from the other.
You can do
a >= b ? a * a + a + b : a + b * b
taken from here.
That works for points in positive plane. If your coordinates can be in negative axis too, then you will have to do:
A = a >= 0 ? 2 * a : -2 * a - 1;
B = b >= 0 ? 2 * b : -2 * b - 1;
A >= B ? A * A + A + B : A + B * B;
But to restrict the output to uint you will have to keep an upper bound for your inputs. and if so, then it turns out that you know the bounds. In other words in programming its impractical to write a function without having an idea on the integer type your inputs and output can be and if so there definitely will be a lower bound and upper bound for every integer type.
public uint GetHashCode(whatever a, whatever b)
{
if (a > ushort.MaxValue || b > ushort.MaxValue ||
a < ushort.MinValue || b < ushort.MinValue)
{
throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException();
}
return (uint)(a * short.MaxValue + b); //very good space/speed efficiency
//or whatever your function is.
}
If you want output to be strictly uint for unknown range of inputs, then there will be reasonable amount of collisions depending upon that range. What I would suggest is to have a function that can overflow but unchecked. Emil's solution is great, in C#:
return unchecked((uint)((a & 0xffff) << 16 | (b & 0xffff)));
See Mapping two integers to one, in a unique and deterministic way for a plethora of options..
According to your use case, it might be possible to use a Quadtree and replace points with the string of branch names. It is actually a sparse representation for points and will need a custom Quadtree structure that extends the canvas by adding branches when you add points off the canvas but it avoids collisions and you'll have benefits like quick nearest neighbor searches.
If you're already using languages or platforms that all objects (even primitive ones like integers) has built-in hash functions implemented (Java platform Languages like Java, .NET platform languages like C#. And others like Python, Ruby, etc ).
You may use built-in hashing values as a building block and add your "hashing flavor" in to the mix. Like:
// C# code snippet
public class SomeVerySimplePoint {
public int X;
public int Y;
public override int GetHashCode() {
return ( Y.GetHashCode() << 16 ) ^ X.GetHashCode();
}
}
And also having test cases like "predefined million point set" running against each possible hash generating algorithm comparison for different aspects like, computation time, memory required, key collision count, and edge cases (too big or too small values) may be handy.
the Fibonacci hash works very well for integer pairs
multiplier 0x9E3779B9
other word sizes 1/phi = (sqrt(5)-1)/2 * 2^w round to odd
a1 + a2*multiplier
this will give very different values for close together pairs
I do not know about the result with all pairs
I am facing the problem of having several integers, and I have to generate one using them. For example.
Int 1: 14
Int 2: 4
Int 3: 8
Int 4: 4
Hash Sum: 43
I have some restriction in the values, the maximum value that and attribute can have is 30, the addition of all of them is always 30. And the attributes are always positive.
The key is that I want to generate the same hash sum for similar integers, for example if I have the integers, 14, 4, 10, 2 then I want to generate the same hash sum, in the case above 43. But of course if the integers are very different (4, 4, 2, 20) then I should have a different hash sum. Also it needs to be fast.
Ideally I would like that the output of the hash sum is between 0 and 512, and it should evenly distributed. With my restrictions I can have around 5K different possibilities, so what I would like to have is around 10 per bucket.
I am sure there are many algorithms that do this, but I could not find a way of googling this thing. Can anyone please post an algorithm to do this?.
Some more information
The whole thing with this is that those integers are attributes for a function. I want to store the values of the function in a table, but I do not have enough memory to store all the different options. That is why I want to generalize between similar attributes.
The reason why 10, 5, 15 are totally different from 5, 10, 15, it is because if you imagine this in 3d then both points are a totally different point
Some more information 2
Some answers try to solve the problem using hashing. But I do not think this is so complex. Thanks to one of the comments I have realized that this is a clustering algorithm problem. If we have only 3 attributes and we imagine the problem in 3d, what I just need is divide the space in blocks.
In fact this can be solved with rules of this type
if (att[0] < 5 && att[1] < 5 && att[2] < 5 && att[3] < 5)
Block = 21
if ( (5 < att[0] < 10) && (5 < att[1] < 10) && (5 < att[2] < 10) && (5 < att[3] < 10))
Block = 45
The problem is that I need a fast and a general way to generate those ifs I cannot write all the possibilities.
The simple solution:
Convert the integers to strings separated by commas, and hash the resulting string using a common hashing algorithm (md5, sha, etc).
If you really want to roll-your-own, I would do something like:
Generate large prime P
Generate random numbers 0 < a[i] < P (for each dimension you have)
To generate hash, calculate: sum(a[i] * x[i]) mod P
Given the inputs a, b, c, and d, each ranging in value from 0 to 30 (5 bits), the following will produce an number in the range of 0 to 255 (8 bits).
bucket = ((a & 0x18) << 3) | ((b & 0x18) << 1) | ((c & 0x18) >> 1) | ((d & 0x18) >> 3)
Whether the general approach is appropriate depends on how the question is interpreted. The 3 least significant bits are dropped, grouping 0-7 in the same set, 8-15 in the next, and so forth.
0-7,0-7,0-7,0-7 -> bucket 0
0-7,0-7,0-7,8-15 -> bucket 1
0-7,0-7,0-7,16-23 -> bucket 2
...
24-30,24-30,24-30,24-30 -> bucket 255
Trivially tested with:
for (int a = 0; a <= 30; a++)
for (int b = 0; b <= 30; b++)
for (int c = 0; c <= 30; c++)
for (int d = 0; d <= 30; d++) {
int bucket = ((a & 0x18) << 3) |
((b & 0x18) << 1) |
((c & 0x18) >> 1) |
((d & 0x18) >> 3);
printf("%d, %d, %d, %d -> %d\n",
a, b, c, d, bucket);
}
You want a hash function that depends on the order of inputs and where similar sets of numbers will generate the same hash? That is, you want 50 5 5 10 and 5 5 10 50 to generate different values, but you want 52 7 4 12 to generate the same hash as 50 5 5 10? A simple way to do something like this is:
long hash = 13;
for (int i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
hash = hash * 37 + array[i] / 5;
}
This is imperfect, but should give you an idea of one way to implement what you want. It will treat the values 50 - 54 as the same value, but it will treat 49 and 50 as different values.
If you want the hash to be independent of the order of the inputs (so the hash of 5 10 20 and 20 10 5 are the same) then one way to do this is to sort the array of integers into ascending order before applying the hash. Another way would be to replace
hash = hash * 37 + array[i] / 5;
with
hash += array[i] / 5;
EDIT: Taking into account your comments in response to this answer, it sounds like my attempt above may serve your needs well enough. It won't be ideal, nor perfect. If you need high performance you have some research and experimentation to do.
To summarize, order is important, so 5 10 20 differs from 20 10 5. Also, you would ideally store each "vector" separately in your hash table, but to handle space limitations you want to store some groups of values in one table entry.
An ideal hash function would return a number evenly spread across the possible values based on your table size. Doing this right depends on the expected size of your table and on the number of and expected maximum value of the input vector values. If you can have negative values as "coordinate" values then this may affect how you compute your hash. If, given your range of input values and the hash function chosen, your maximum hash value is less than your hash table size, then you need to change the hash function to generate a larger hash value.
You might want to try using vectors to describe each number set as the hash value.
EDIT:
Since you're not describing why you want to not run the function itself, I'm guessing it's long running. Since you haven't described the breadth of the argument set.
If every value is expected then a full lookup table in a database might be faster.
If you're expecting repeated calls with the same arguments and little overall variation, then you could look at memoizing so only the first run for a argument set is expensive, and each additional request is fast, with less memory usage.
You would need to define what you mean by "similar". Hashes are generally designed to create unique results from unique input.
One approach would be to normalize your input and then generate a hash from the results.
Generating the same hash sum is called a collision, and is a bad thing for a hash to have. It makes it less useful.
If you want similar values to give the same output, you can divide the input by however close you want them to count. If the order makes a difference, use a different divisor for each number. The following function does what you describe:
int SqueezedSum( int a, int b, int c, int d )
{
return (a/11) + (b/7) + (c/5) + (d/3);
}
This is not a hash, but does what you describe.
You want to look into geometric hashing. In "standard" hashing you want
a short key
inverse resistance
collision resistance
With geometric hashing you susbtitute number 3 with something whihch is almost opposite; namely close initial values give close hash values.
Another way to view my problem is using the multidimesional scaling (MS). In MS we start with a matrix of items and what we want is assign a location of each item to an N dimensional space. Reducing in this way the number of dimensions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_scaling