Push-Swap Project

42 Yerevan Push-Swap
For further information about 42cursus and its projects, please refer to 42cursus repo.

📜 About Project · 📑 Operations List · 🧮 Algorithm · 🌟 Bonus Part · 👨‍💻 Usage

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📜 About Project

• This project will make you sort data on a stack, with a limited set of operations, using the lowest possible number of actions.

• The Push_swap project is a very simple and highly effective algorithm project: data will need to be sorted.
  You have at your disposal a set of int values, 2 stacks and a set of operations to manipulate both stacks.

• The goal is to write a program in C called push_swap which calculates and displays on the standard output the operations, that sort the integers received as arguments.

• The learning objectives of this project are rigor, use of C and use of basic algorithms. Especially looking at the complexity of these basic algorithms.

• You are allowed to use the following functions: malloc, free, exit, write, read.

For detailed information, refer to the subject of this project.

🚀 TLDR: Given a set of integers, sort it using a predefined set of operations using 
	 two stacks. The operations list is defined below. This program outputs 
         push_swap operations that sorts the input integers.

Note

Because of 42 School norm requirements:

• Each function can't have more then 25 lines of code.
• All variables are declared and aligned at the top of each function.
• Project should be created just with allowed functions otherwise it's cheating.

📑 Operations List

The program is only allowed to work with two stacks: stack A and stack B.
All the numbers are initially added to stack A, and stack B is empty.

The possible operations are:

Code	Operations	Action
sa	swap a	swaps the 2 top elements of stack a
sb	swap b	swaps the 2 top elements of stack b
ss	swap a + swap b	both sa and sb
pa	push a	moves the top element of stack b at the top of stack a
pb	push b	moves the top element of stack a at the top of stack b
ra	rotate a	shifts all elements of stack a from bottom to top
rb	rotate b	shifts all elements of stack b from bottom to top
rr	rotate a + rotate b	both ra and rb
rra	reverse rotate a	shifts all elements of stack a from top to bottom
rrb	reverse rotate b	shifts all elements of stack b from top to bottom
rrr	reverse rotate a + reverse rotate b	both rra and rrb

🧮 Algorithm

I use Butterfly algorithm for sorting. Here is a short description:

• First, need to generate a chunk number.
• After I iterate through stack A look for a number, whose index is smaller than the counter (numbers count in stack B).
• If I find that number, I do pb and rb.
• If no, I check if the number is smaller than counter + chunk, and do only pb.
• Repeat these operations until stack A becomes empty.
• In stack B we will have numbers in order like 90-degree rotated butterfly 🦋.
• After that, I will iterate through stack B and push the maximum index in stack A (i.e. pa) until stack B becomes empty.
• After these operations, stack A becomes sorted.

The chunk number must be different depending on the numbers count.
So need to experiment with chunk number to achieve the best operations count.
For more information about the algorithm see this video.
Also, you can visualize algorithm work by this visualizer.

🌟 Bonus Part

• The Bonus exercise was to write a program called 'checker' that can read the operations from stdin and perform them on a stack of numbers.
• Checker will display 'OK' when the given operations will sort the numbers in ascending order. Otherwise it displays 'KO'.
• In case of an error (f.ex. operations doesn't exist) it displays 'Error'.

👨‍💻 Usage

Requirements

The program is written in C language and thus needs the gcc compiler and some standard C libraries to run.

Instructions

1. Compiling the program

To compile the program, run:

$ cd path/to/push_swap && make

To compile the checker, run:

$ cd path/to/push_swap && make bonus

2. How to run the program

Run the executable together with the set of numbers separated by a space:

./push_swap 5 7 10 4 6 8 9 2 1 3

To run the checker on push_swap, use the pipe:

ARG="5 7 10 4 6 8 9 2 1 3"; ./push_swap $ARG | ./checker $ARG

Use clean to delete all object files, fclean to remove executable and all object files, and re to recompile the program:

make clean / make fclean / make re