LeetCode - Count Primes

1 minute read

Problem description

description

Count the number of prime numbers less than a non-negative number, n.

Example:

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Input: 10
Output: 4
Explanation: There are 4 prime numbers less than 10, they are 2, 3, 5, 7.

Analysis

This is a easy problem. There are two things need to be careful about.

The first is that we can iterate all i where i * i < n, which make the size of run into sqrt size.

And the second one is to use Sieve to calculate the prime quickly.

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class Solution {
    public int countPrimes(int n) {
        if (n <= 2){
            return 0;
        }
        
        boolean[] hole = new boolean[n];
        
        hole[0] = true;
        hole[1] = true;
        hole[2] = false;
        
        for (int i = 2; i*i < n; i++){
            if (!hole[i]){
                int max = n % i == 0 ? n/i:n/i+1;
                for (int j = 2; j < max; j++){
                    hole[j*i] = true;
                }
            }
        }
        
        int cnt = 0;
        
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++){
            if (!hole[i]){
                cnt++;
            }
        }
        
        return cnt;
    }
}

A more elegant code is:

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public static int countPrimes(int n){
      boolean primes[] = new boolean[n];
        for(int i=0; i<primes.length;i++){
            primes[i] = true;
        }

        for(int i=2; i*i <primes.length;i++){
            if(primes[i]){
                for(int j=i;j*i<primes.length;j++){
                    primes[i*j]=false;
                }
            }
        }

        int primesCount =0;

        for(int i=2;i<primes.length;i++){
            if(primes[i]){
                primesCount++;
            }
        }
        return primesCount;
    }

What to improve