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Functions 3
Sorting an Integer

Relations & Notation

Before getting too deep into how sorting works, I'm going to introduce some new functions and convenience notation first. In the first post in this series, we talked about $\text{eq}$, which is a relation. A relation can be defined for our needs as a function of two arguments that always evaluates to either $0$ or $1$. That is, it is a function $f$ with the type signature

$$ f : \mathbb{R} \to \{0, 1\} $$

Other common relations can be defined as follows:

$$\begin{aligned} \text{lt}(x, y) &= \text{eq}(-1, \text{sign}(x - y)) \\ \text{gt}(x, y) &= \text{eq}(1, \text{sign}(x - y)) \\ \text{leq}(x, y) &= 1 - \text{gt}(x, y) \\ \text{geq}(x, y) &= 1 - \text{lt}(x, y) \end{aligned}$$

where the equations are x < y, x > y, x <= y, and x >= y, respectively. "Calling" these relations each time get cumbersome, so we will be using a notation inspired by the Iverson Bracket for convenience. Instead of writing $\text{lt}(x, y)$, we will write $[x < y]$. This extends to the other relations defined above.

Note: We will only use it with comparison operators whose functions have been previously defined, so that we are always using only binary & elementary operations "under the hood".

Sorting

What do we mean by sorting?

Since the primary "data" that we are working with are integers, a sorting function would be one that sorts the digits within an integer. For example, $$ \text{sort}_{10}(31524_{10}) = 54321_{10} $$ The reason we sort in "decreasing" order is twofold: Since the digit at index $i = 0$ is the rightmost digit, sorting in this direction would mean that iterating from $i = 0$ to $\text{len}_b(x) - 1$ would traverse the digits in increasing order. Furthermore, we sort in this order to preserve $0$'s. If we sorted in the other direction, $1001$ and $101$ would look the same when sorted in base $10$, which is not a desirable quality.

Implementation

Sorting follows pretty naturally after reversing. Reversing is simply taking every digit of a number and placing it at a new index. Sorting is the exact same thing, except that the function that decides the new indices is different. That is,

$$\begin{aligned} \text{sort}_b(x) = \sum_{i = 0}^{\text{len}_b(x) - 1} \text{at}_b(x, i) \cdot b^{\sigma(x, i, b)} \end{aligned}$$

where $\sigma(x, i, b)$ returns the new index of the digit at index $i$ of $x$ in base $b$. Notice this is exactly $\text{rev}$ when

$$\sigma_{rev}(x, i, b) = \text{len}_b(x) - i - 1$$

Now, what would $\sigma_{sort}(x, i, b)$ be? A reasonable guess for would be the number of digits in $x$ less than $\text{at}(x, i, b)$. That is,

$$\begin{aligned} \sigma_{sort}(x, i, b) = \sum_{j = 0}^{\text{len}_b(x) - 1} [\text{at}_b(x, j) < \text{at}_b(x, i)] \end{aligned}$$

This doesn't work for numbers with duplicate digits, however, as this would send both instances of the digit $3$ in the number $1233$ to the same index.

What we ended up coming up with was this: $\sigma_{sort}$ would be the number of digits in $x$ strictly less than $\text{at}_b(x, i)$ plus the number of instances of the digit $\text{at}_b(x, i)$ at indices less than $i$. That is,

$$\begin{aligned} \sigma_{eq}(x, i, b) &= \sum_{j = 0}^{i - 1} [\text{at}_b(x, j) = \text{at}_b(x, i)] \\ \sigma_{lt}(x, i, b) &= \sum_{j = 0}^{\text{len}_b(x) - 1} [\text{at}_b(x, j) < \text{at}_b(x, i)] \\ \sigma_{sort}(x, i, b) &= \sigma_{eq}(x, i, b) + \sigma_{lt}(x, i, b) \end{aligned}$$

Now we can define $\text{sort}$ as,

$$\begin{aligned} \text{sort}_b(x) = \sum_{i = 0}^{\text{len}_b(x) - 1} \text{at}_b(x, i) \cdot b^{{\sigma_{sort}}(x, i, b)} \end{aligned}$$

An interesting side note here is that, in some sense, this sort is stable. Obviously integers don't really have any sense of identity. Every $1$ is the same as every other $1$ in the pool of integers $\mathbb{Z}$. If digits did have some sort of identity, as they do in computers, then this sorting function would be considered stable.

Similar to what we did in Functions 2 we can convert this definition to code. Here's an example in Python,

from math import *

def len(x, b):
  return ceil(log(x + 1, b))

def at(x, i, b):
  return floor(abs(x) / (b ** i)) % b

def sign(x):
  return floor(x / (abs(x) + 1)) + ceil(x / (abs(x) + 1))

def eq(x, y):
  return 1 - ceil(abs(x - y) / (abs(x - y) + 1))

def lt(x, y):
  return eq(-1, sign(x - y))

def sigma_eq(x, i, b):
  return sum(eq(at(x, j, b), at(x, i, b)) for j in range(0, i))

def sigma_lt(x, i, b):
  return sum(lt(at(x, j, b), at(x, i, b)) for j in range(0, len(x, b)))

def sigma_sort(x, i, b):
  return sigma_eq(x, i, b) + sigma_lt(x, i, b)

def sort(x, b):
  return sum(at(x, i, b) * b ** sigma_sort(x, i, b)
    for i in range(len(x, b)))

And again let's test it out to see if it works:

>>> sort(18081971, 10)
98871110
>>> sort(0o1420740, 8) == 0o7442100
True
>>> sort(0xcafebabe, 16) == 0xfeecbbaa
True

Sweet! Looks like we can sort integers now. Next we'll probably talk about making a Look and Say function $L(x)$, that takes in an integer $x$ and outputs the next term in the Look and Say sequence.