# Arranging Bubbles

Note, challenge copied from question asked at math.stackexchange.

Recently, I attained quite some skill at blowing bubbles. At first I would blow bubbles like this:

But then things started getting strange:

After a while, I was blowing some pretty weird bubbles:

After blowing hundreds, maybe even thousands of such bubbles, my forehead suddenly wrinkled with the question: Given n bubbles, how many different ways can you arrange them? For example if n = 1, there is only 1 arrangement. If n = 2, there are 2 arrangements. If n = 3, there are 4 arrangements. If n = 4, there are 9 arrangements.

Here are the 9 arrangements of 4 bubbles:

After blowing all of these marvelous bubbles, I decided that I should share the delight of counting their arrangements with you. So here is your task:

## Goal

Write a program, function, or similar that counts the number of ways you can arrange n bubbles.

## Input

n, the number of bubbles. n > 0

## Output

The number of ways you can arrange these bubbles.

## Winning Criteria

It would be really cool if we can blow a bubble around your code. The smaller you make your code, the easier it will be to do so. So the person who makes the code with the least number of bytes will win the contest.

### Extra information

OEIS

• If the bubbles may intersect it is an open problem, with 173 solutions for n=4.
– orlp
Jan 12 '17 at 18:21
• @orlp Fortunately, these bubbles do not intersect. Jan 12 '17 at 18:23
• Is 0 a valid input? Jan 12 '17 at 21:49
• @KenY-N Yes. There is already an OEIS link at the bottom Jan 13 '17 at 4:11
• Oops! Delete stupid comment time... Jan 13 '17 at 4:12

# Python 2, 92 87 bytes

a=lambda n:n<2or sum((k%d<1)*d*a(d)*a(n-k)for k in range(1,n)for d in range(1,1+k))/~-n


In plain english: to compute a(n) we calculate d*a(d)*a(n-k) for every divisor d of every positive integer k smaller than or equal to n, sum all these, and divide by n-1.

To make it run faster, run in Python 3 (replacing / with // in the above function) and memoize:

import functools
a = functools.lru_cache(None)(a)


If you do this it computes a(50) = 425976989835141038353 instantly.

• Wow, that's cool. I assume that lru_cache() memoizes the function? Jan 12 '17 at 18:51
• @PatrickRoberts Yep, usually it's used as a function decorator, but you can also apply it manually to a function.
– orlp
Jan 12 '17 at 18:51
• @PatrickRoberts Here are the docs for lru_cache. Jan 13 '17 at 10:14
• This function returns True for n<2. I guess that's ok for n=1, since in Python True evaluates to 1 in numeric contexts, but a(0) should return 0. You could fix that with n<2 and n or sum... but there may be a more compact way. Jan 13 '17 at 10:16
• I guess an argument can be made that there's one way to arrange zero bubbles, but that's not consistent with A000081. OTOH, if we only need to solve for positive n then we can safely ignore this corner case, since it doesn't impact the recursive calls for higher n. Jan 13 '17 at 16:55

# GNU Prolog, 98 bytes

b(x,0,x).
b(T/H,N,H):-N#=A+B+1,b(H,A,_),b(T,B,J),H@>=J.
c(X,Y):-findall(A,b(A,X,_),L),length(L,Y).


This answer is a great example of how Prolog can struggle with even the simplest I/O formats. It works in true Prolog style via describing the problem, rather than the algorithm to solve it: it specifies what counts as a legal bubble arrangement, asks Prolog to generate all those bubble arrangements, and then counts them. The generation takes 55 characters (the first two lines of the program). The counting and I/O takes the other 43 (the third line, and the newline that separates the two parts). I bet this isn't a problem that the OP expected to cause languages to struggle with I/O! (Note: Stack Exchange's syntax highlighting makes this harder to read, not easier, so I turned it off).

## Explanation

Let's start with a pseudocode version of a similar program that doesn't actually work:

b(Bubbles,Count) if map(b,Bubbles,BubbleCounts)
and sum(BubbleCounts,InteriorCount)
and Count is InteriorCount + 1
and is_sorted(Bubbles).
c(Count,NPossibilities) if listof(Bubbles,b(Bubbles,Count),List)
and length(List,NPossibilities).


It should be fairly clear how b works: we're representing bubbles via sorted lists (which are a simple implementation of multisets that causes equal multisets to compare equal), and a single bubble [] has a count of 1, with a larger bubble having a count equal to the total count of the bubbles inside plus 1. For a count of 4, this program would (if it worked) generate the following lists:

[[],[],[],[]]
[[],[],[[]]]
[[],[[],[]]]
[[],[[[]]]]
[[[]],[[]]]
[[[],[],[]]]
[[[],[[]]]]
[[[[],[]]]]
[[[[[]]]]]


This program is unsuitable as an answer for several reasons, but the most pressing is that Prolog doesn't actually have a map predicate (and writing it would take too many bytes). So instead, we write the program more like this:

b([], 0).
and b(Tail,TailCount)
and Count is HeadCount + TailCount + 1
c(Count,NPossibilities) if listof(Bubbles,b(Bubbles,Count),List)
and length(List,NPossibilities).


The other major problem here is that it'll go into an infinite loop when run, because of the way Prolog's evaluation order works. However, we can solve the infinite loop by rearranging the program slightly:

b([], 0).
and b(Tail,TailCount)
c(Count,NPossibilities) if listof(Bubbles,b(Bubbles,Count),List)
and length(List,NPossibilities).


This might look fairly weird – we're adding together the counts before we know what they are – but GNU Prolog's #= is capable of handling that sort of noncausal arithmetic, and because it's the very first line of b, and the HeadCount and TailCount must both be less than Count (which is known), it serves as a method of naturally limiting how many times the recursive term can match, and thus causes the program to always terminate.

The next step is to golf this down a bit. Removing whitespace, using single-character variable names, using abbreviations like :- for if and , for and, using setof rather than listof (it has a shorter name and produces the same results in this case), and using sort0(X,X) rather than is_sorted(X) (because is_sorted isn't actually a real function, I made it up):

b([],0).
b([H|T],N):-N#=A+B+1,b(H,A),b(T,B),sort0([H|T],[H|T]).
c(X,Y):-setof(A,b(A,X),L),length(L,Y).


This is fairly short, but it's possible to do better. The key insight is that [H|T] is really verbose as list syntaxes go. As Lisp programmers will know, a list is basically just made of cons cells, which are basically just tuples, and hardly any part of this program is using list builtins. Prolog has several very short tuple syntaxes (my favourite is A-B, but my second favourite is A/B, which I'm using here because it produces easier-to-read debug output in this case); and we can also choose our own single-character nil for the end of the list, rather than being stuck with the two-character [] (I chose x, but basically anything works). So instead of [H|T], we can use T/H, and get output from b that looks like this (note that the sort order on tuples is a little different from that on lists, so these aren't in the same order as above):

x/x/x/x/x
x/x/x/(x/x)
x/(x/x)/(x/x)
x/x/(x/x/x)
x/(x/x/x/x)
x/x/(x/(x/x))
x/(x/x/(x/x))
x/(x/(x/x/x))
x/(x/(x/(x/x)))


This is rather harder to read than the nested lists above, but it's possible; mentally skip the xs, and interpret /() as a bubble (or just plain / as a degenerate bubble with no contents, if there's no () after it), and the elements have a 1-to-1 (if disordered) correspondence with the list version shown above.

Of course, this list representation, despite being much shorter, has a major drawback; it's not built into the language, so we can't use sort0 to check if our list is sorted. sort0 is fairly verbose anyway, though, so doing it by hand isn't a huge loss (in fact, doing it by hand on the [H|T] list representation comes to exactly the same number of bytes). The key insight here is that the program as written checks to see if the list is sorted, if its tail is sorted, if its tail is sorted, and so on; there are a lot of redundant checks, and we can exploit that. Instead, we'll just check to ensure that the first two elements are in order (which ensures that the list will end up sorted once the list itself and all its suffixes are checked).

The first element is easily accessible; that's just the head of the list H. The second element is rather harder to access, though, and may not exist. Luckily, x is less than all the tuples we're considering (via Prolog's generalized comparison operator @>=), so we can consider the "second element" of a singleton list to be x and the program will work fine. As for actually accessing the second element, the tersest method is to add a third argument (an out argument) to b, that returns x in the base case and H in the recursive case; this means that we can grab the head of the tail as an output from the second recursive call to B, and of course the head of the tail is the list's second element. So b looks like this now:

b(x,0,x).
b(T/H,N,H):-N#=A+B+1,b(H,A,_),b(T,B,J),H@>=J.


The base case is simple enough (empty list, return a count of 0, the empty list's "first element" is x). The recursive case starts out the same way as before (just with the T/H notation rather than [H|T], and H as an extra out argument); we disregard the extra argument from the recursive call on the head, but store it in J in the recursive call on the tail. Then all we have to do is ensure that H is greater than or equal to J (i.e. "if the list has at least two elements, the first is greater than or equal to the second) in order to ensure that the list ends up sorted.

Unfortunately, setof throws a fit if we try to use the previous definition of c together with this new definition of b, because it treats unused out parameters in more or less the same way as an SQL GROUP BY, which is completely not what we want. It's possible to reconfigure it to do what we want, but that reconfiguration costs characters. Instead, we use findall, which has a more convenient default behaviour and is only two characters longer, giving us this definition of c:

c(X,Y):-findall(A,b(A,X,_),L),length(L,Y).


And that's the complete program; tersely generate bubble patterns, then spend a whole load of bytes counting them (we need a rather long findall to convert the generator to a list, then an unfortunately verbosely named length to check the length of that list, plus the boilerplate for a function declaration).

• "Prolog doesn't actually have a map predicate ": Prolog does have the maplist/2-8predicate, though I'm not sure this will makes things shorter here. Jan 13 '17 at 14:34
• @Fatalize: Huh, looks like that was added in a newer version. It's not in the documentation for the install I have, and it doesn't work in practice: | ?- maplist(reverse,[A,B]). uncaught exception: error(existence_error(procedure,maplist/2),top_level/0)
– user62131
Jan 13 '17 at 17:40
• That's really strange; maplist is a very commonly used predicate that is provided in the major Prolog distributions (like SWI-Prolog and SiCStus) Jan 13 '17 at 19:40

# Mathematica, 68 bytes

I bet this can be beaten (even in Mathematica) with a from-scratch implementation, but here's the builtin version:

<<NumericalDifferentialEquationAnalysis
Last@ButcherTreeCount[#+1]&


ButcherTreeCount is 0-indexed, hence the [#+1], and returns a list of all values up to its argument, hence the Last@. But otherwise it's just the builtin for this function. However, it requires loading a package, which is what the first line does.

• "Of course Mathematica has a builtin for that."
– orlp
Jan 12 '17 at 19:04

# APL (Dyalog Unicode), 40 bytes

{1≥⍵:⍵⋄w÷⍨+/∊(0=v|⊂⌽v)×v××∘⊂⍨∇¨v←⍳w←⍵-1}


Try it online!

A port of orlp's Python 2 answer, using a vector of nested vectors in place of nested for-loops.

### How it works

{1≥⍵:⍵⋄w÷⍨+/∊(0=v|⊂⌽v)×v××∘⊂⍨∇¨v←⍳w←⍵-1}  ⍝ Input: n
{1≥⍵:⍵⋄                                }  ⍝ If n≤1, return n; otherwise,
w←⍵-1   ⍝ w←n-1
v←⍳w       ⍝ v←1..n-1
∇¨  ⍝ a←Recursive call on each of v; a(1), .., a(n-1)
×∘⊂⍨    ⍝ Multiply each of a with a, giving nested array
⍝ where [d][n-k] will contain the desired value at each iteration in Python code
v×  ⍝ Multiply each of v (the value of d) with each row of the above
×    ⍝ Multiply each with
(0=v|⊂⌽v)     ⍝ 1 if n-k is divisible by d, 0 otherwise
w÷⍨+/∊  ⍝ Flatten, sum, and divide by n-1
`
• The right man for the job May 24 '20 at 14:54