Reading an article about getting a job in ABBYY, I came across the following task:

Find the Nth Fibonacci Number in O(N) time of arithmetic operations.

Thinking about it, I realized that the only solutions coming to my mind were those operating in O(n) time. But I found a better solution later.

I am going to use the following denotation of sets:

- non-negative integers

— positive integers

According to various mathematic traditions, a set of natural numbers can either contain 0 or not. Therefore, it’s preferred to indicate it explicitly in international mathematic texts.

The Solution

Donald E. Knuth provides a matrix identity of the following form:

The identity is provided without any proof, but it’s quite easy to prove it by induction.

The matrix on the right is called Q-matrix.

Let’s indicate:

According to the identity, . Thus, to calculate , we should calculate matrix and take the first element of the first line (the enumeration starts with 1).

Since calculation comes to raising the matrix to power, let’s take a look at this process in details.

Let’s say there is a matrix to be raised to power. Suppose, is the power of 2. Thus, .

We can represent in the form of a tree:

Meaning that:

So, to calculate matrix, we should calculate matrix and multiply it by itself. To calculate we would have to do the same with and so on.

Obviously, the tree height is .

Let’s estimate calculation time. matrix is of the same size in any power. Therefore, we can perform the multiplication of two matrices in any power in . We should perform of such multiplications. So, complexity is .

But what if n is not a power of 2?

There is a question now: what should we do if is not a power of 2? We can factor down any natural number as a sum of numbers that are the power of 2, without any repetitions (we do it all the time when converting a number from a binary to decimal numeral system). I.e.:

where is a set of powers, with the help of which we express . Remembering that is the power of a matrix, we get:

.

Matrix multiplication is not commutative though, i.e. the order of operands during the multiplication is important. But the commutative property is kept for the so-called permutation matrices. Matrix is permutational for , . Thus, we will not have to consider the order of operands during the multiplication task, which simplifies the process a bit.

So, we can represent the algorithm of calculation if the form of the following two steps:

Factor down into the sum of the powers of two in the form of . Calculate all the elements of set. Calculate .

Let’s estimate the execution time of the given algorithm.

The first step performs in , where is the number of binary digits in .

Since we have to perform no more than matrix exponentiation, the second step takes time.

The third step performs in , as we should multiply matrices no more than times.

Optimization

Is it possible to improve the algorithm execution time? Yes, it is. You should note that the second step does not describe the method of calculating matrices that belong to set. We know that is the power of 2 for each of them. Getting back to the picture with the tree, it means that all of them lie in some or other tree tiers and to calculate the greater ones, we should calculate the inferior ones. If we apply Memoization technique and cache all the calculated matrices of every tier, this will allow us to shorten the execution time of the second step up to , as well as the total execution time of a whole algorithm. That’s exactly what we need according to the task.

The Code

Let’s get down to coding. I implemented the algorithm in Python due to the following reasons:

It’s expressive enough to replace the pseudo code

Its arbitrary-precision arithmetic is clear.

It’s going to look like this:

class MatrixFibonacci: Q = [[1, 1], [1, 0]] def __init__(self): self.__memo = {} def __multiply_matrices(self, M1, M2): """Matrices miltiplication (the matrices are expected in the form of a list of 2x2 size).""" a11 = M1[0][0]*M2[0][0] + M1[0][1]*M2[1][0] a12 = M1[0][0]*M2[0][1] + M1[0][1]*M2[1][1] a21 = M1[1][0]*M2[0][0] + M1[1][1]*M2[1][0] a22 = M1[1][0]*M2[0][1] + M1[1][1]*M2[1][1] r = [[a11, a12], [a21, a22]] return r def __get_matrix_power(self, M, p): """Matrix exponentiation (it is expected that p that is equal to the power of 2).""" if p == 1: return M if p in self.__memo: return self.__memo[p] K = self.__get_matrix_power(M, int(p/2)) R = self.__multiply_matrices(K, K) self.__memo[p] = R return R def get_number(self, n): """Getting the nth Fibonacci number (a non-negative integer number is expected as n).""" if n == 0: return 0 if n == 1: return 1 # Factoring down the passed power into the powers that are equal to the power of 2), # i.e. 62 = 2^5 + 2^4 + 2^3 + 2^2 + 2^0 = 32 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 1. powers = [int(pow(2, b)) for (b, d) in enumerate(reversed(bin(n-1)[2:])) if d == '1'] # The same, but less pythonic: http://pastebin.com/h8cKDkHX matrices = [self.__get_matrix_power(MatrixFibonacci.Q, p) for p in powers] while len(matrices) > 1: M1 = matrices.pop() M2 = matrices.pop() R = self.__multiply_matrices(M1, M2) matrices.append® return matrices[0][0][0] mfib = MatrixFibonacci() for n in range(0, 128): num = mfib.get_number(n) print(num)

Benchmarks

I wanted to compare the execution time of my algorithm with a classical iteration algorithm that is based on the consecutive calculation saving the previous two numbers. I implemented it like this:

def get_number(self, n): if n == 0: return 0 a = 0 b = 1 c = 1 for i in range(n-1): c = a + b a = b b = c return c

I used the following technique of performance testing. number accepts values. Objects of MatrixFibonacci and IterationFibonacci (it’s the class that calculates Fibonacci numbers iteratively) classes are created for each . Then, an arbitrary integer is generated 10 000 times.

The test outputs a lot of strings like: n T1 T2. These data is used for building a chart.

As you can see from the chart, the matrix algorithm leaves the iterative algorithm behind starting from (its worth noting that will not fit into unsigned 64 bits). I guess, it’s possible to say that the algorithm is impractical, though its theoretical speed is quite good.

You will find the complete source code with the benchmark here.

The code for gnuplot to build charts:

set terminal png set output 'fibgr.png' set grid set style data linespoints set title "Calculation of 10000 Fibonacci numbers (Fn)" set xlabel "Approximate number n" set ylabel "Time, s" plot "benchmark.txt" using 1:2 with lines title 'iterative', \ "benchmark.txt" using 1:3 with lines title 'matrix'

References