Assignment 1: Analysing 3-sum and Fast 3-sum algorithms

Objectives The objective of this assignment is to compare the running time complexity of 3-sum and fast 3sum algorithms. Description The 3-sum is a simple algorithm that finds triplets in an array that sum to 0. The brute force method to solve this problem uses triple for loops to find all combinations. The complexity for this method is high i.e. the order of N3. The fast 3-sum algorithm is an improvement that uses sorting and binary search to find triplets that sum to 0. The fast 3-sum improves on the 3-sum algorithm in terms of complexity.
Task 1

Implement the 3-sum algorithm and print out running times for 1k, 4k and 8k integers. You can generate these integers using a simple function that runs a for loop with the random function to generate these integers.
Task 2

Implement the fast 3-sum algorithm and print out running times for 1k, 4k and 8k integers. You will need to use some sorting algorithm to sort your data and the binary search algorithm to search data.
Table

1k 3-sum Fast 3-sum

Running times for input data in seconds 4k

8k

Fill in the above table and plot a graph to show the comparisons of running times of the two algorithms.
Note

You can measure the efficiency of the algorithms by calculating the time it takes to execute the algorithm. You can use a built-in C++ function called clock() to compute the time.
#include <ctime> ... // header file for clock() and CLOCKS_PER_SEC

clock_t start = clock(); // start timer <Your code comes here> clock_t stop = clock(); // stop timer cpu_time_used = float(stop-start)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC; //time in seconds

Deliverable You are required to upload the assignment as Assign1_your_name.doc on LMS.