Question: Suppose your neighbor, sweet Mrs. McGregor, has invited you to her house to help her with a computer problem. She has a huge collection of
Suppose your neighbor, sweet Mrs. McGregor, has invited you to her house to help her with a computer problem. She has a huge collection of JPEG images of bunny rabbits stored on her computer and a shoebox full of 1 gigabyte USB drives. She is asking that you help her copy her images onto the drives in a way that minimizes the number of drives used. It is easy to determine the size of each image, but finding the optimal way of storing images on the fewest number of drives is an instance of the bin packing problem, which is a difficult problem to solve in general. Nevertheless, Mrs. McGregor has suggested that you use the first fit heuristic to solve this problem, which she recalls from her days as a young computer scientist. In applying this heuristic here, you would consider the images one at a time and, for each image, I, you would store it on the first USB drive where it would fit, considering the drives in order by their remaining storage capacity. Unfortunately, Mrs. McGregor’s way of doing this results in an algorithm with a running time of O(mn), where m is the number of images and n
Step by Step Solution
3.45 Rating (161 Votes )
There are 3 Steps involved in it
Maintain the set of USB drives in a balanced binary search tree T ord... View full answer
Get step-by-step solutions from verified subject matter experts
