You have an ascending list of numbers, what is the most efficient algorithm you can think of to get the ascending list of sums of every two numbers in that list. Duplicates in
Rather than coding this out, I figure I'll pseudo-code it in steps and explain my logic, so that better programmers can poke holes in my logic if necessary.
On the first step we start out with a list of numbers length n. For each number we need to create a list of length n-1 becuase we aren't adding a number to itself. By the end we have a list of about n sorted lists that was generated in O(n^2) time.
step 1 (startinglist)
for each number num1 in startinglist
for each number num2 in startinglist
add num1 plus num2 into templist
add templist to sumlist
return sumlist
In step 2 because the lists were sorted by design (add a number to each element in a sorted list and the list will still be sorted) we can simply do a mergesort by merging each list together rather than mergesorting the whole lot. In the end this should take O(n^2) time.
step 2 (sumlist)
create an empty list mergedlist
for each list templist in sumlist
set mergelist equal to: merge(mergedlist,templist)
return mergedlist
The merge method would be then the normal merge step with a check to make sure that there are no duplicate sums. I won't write this out because anyone can look up mergesort.
So there's my solution. The entire algorithm is O(n^2) time. Feel free to point out any mistakes or improvements.