Lazy Math Instructor

Introduction

This is my code for the proseminar Selected Fun Problems of the ACM Programming Contest at the University of Tübingen, Summer Term 2023.

The problem worked on is Lazy Math Instructor: The exercise is to check arbitrary terms for equivalence. Terms may contain brackets, addition, subtraction and multiplication of integer constants and variables a to z.

They are evaluated from left to right with equal operator precedence for all operations.

Contents

This repository contains:

• The problem description
• My presentation slides
• My submitted paper
• My source code (split in several .cs files)
• Several input examples: Binomial formulas, Examples from the problem description and a long term
• A term generator that can generate random terms of a desired length

Usage of the program

The program is written in C# .NET 7.0 and should run on any supported platform.

Program reads from STDIN:

• 1 line with the number n of equivalences to test
• 2n lines with a term each.

Program writes to STDOUT:

• n lines, where the kth line is
  • YES if the k-th pair of terms are equivalent
  • NO if they aren't.

Verbose mode can be enabled by passing -v as a command line argument, in which case the program will print each addition, subtraction and multiplication operation it performs, as well as each term after it was parsed, normalized and ordered deterministically.

Usage of the term generator:

Calling the script without any arguments, it generates N = 20 random terms of approximately LENGTH = 250 characters.

N and LENGTH can be passed as command line arguments to adjust the output. N must be an even number because the Lazy Math Instructor program can only work with pairs of terms.

The script's STDOUT can be used as STDIN for the main program for benchmarking.