How to do matrix conversions by row and columns toggles?

Question

I have got a square matrix consisting of elements either 1 or 0. An ith row toggle toggles all the ith row elements (1 becomes 0 and vice versa) and jth column toggle toggle

Answer 1

This is a state space search problem. You are searching for the optimum path from a starting state to a destination state. In this particular case, "optimum" is defined as "minimum number of operations".

The state space is the set of binary matrices generatable from the starting position by row and column toggle operations.

ASSUMING that the destination is in the state space (NOT a valid assumption in some cases: see Henrik's answer), I'd try throwing a classic heuristic search (probably A*, since it is about the best of the breed) algorithm at the problem and see what happened.

The first, most obvious heuristic is "number of correct elements".

Any decent Artificial Intelligence textbook will discuss search and the A* algorithm.

You can represent your matrix as a nonnegative integer, with each cell in the matrix corresponding to exactly one bit in the integer On a system that supports 64-bit long long unsigned ints, this lets you play with anything up to 8x8. You can then use exclusive-OR operations on the number to implement the row and column toggle operations.

CAUTION: the raw total state space size is 2^(N^2), where N is the number of rows (or columns). For a 4x4 matrix, that's 2^16 = 65536 possible states.