Friday, November 13, 2009

Stacks of Flapjacks

This problem appeared in University of Puerto Rico at Bayamon Programming Competitions.
Here is the description of the problem:

Cooking the perfect stack of pancakes on a grill is a tricky business, because no matter
how hard you try all pancakes in any stack have different diameters. For neatness’s sake,
however, you can sort the stack by size such that each pancake is smaller than all the
pancakes below it. The size of a pancake is given by its diameter.

Sorting a stack is done by a sequence of pancake “flips.” A flip consists of inserting
a spatula between two pancakes in a stack and flipping (reversing) all the pancakes on
the spatula (reversing the sub-stack). A flip is specified by giving the position of the
pancake on the bottom of the sub-stack to be flipped relative to the entire stack. The
bottom pancake has position 1, while the top pancake on a stack of n pancakes has
position n.

A stack is specified by giving the diameter of each pancake in the stack in the order
in which the pancakes appear. For example, consider the three stacks of pancakes below
in which pancake 8 is the top-most pancake of the left stack:
8 7 2
4 6 5
6 4 8
7 8 4
5 5 6
2 2 7
The stack on the left can be transformed to the stack in the middle via flip(3). The
middle stack can be transformed into the right stack via the command flip(1).

Input
The input consists of a sequence of stacks of pancakes. Each stack will consist of between
1 and 30 pancakes and each pancake will have an integer diameter between 1 and 100.
The input is terminated by end-of-file. Each stack is given as a single line of input with
the top pancake on a stack appearing first on a line, the bottom pancake appearing
last, and all pancakes separated by a space.

Output
For each stack of pancakes, your program should echo the original stack on one line,
followed by a sequence of flips that results in sorting the stack of pancakes so that the
largest pancake is on the bottom and the smallest on top. The sequence of flips for each
stack should be terminated by a 0, indicating no more flips necessary. Once a stack is
sorted, no more flips should be made.

Sample Input
1 2 3 4 5
5 4 3 2 1
5 1 2 3 4

Sample Output
1 2 3 4 5
0
5 4 3 2 1
1 0
5 1 2 3 4
1 2 0
Here is the solution of the problem.
Another solution in Java.

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