Question

anonymization via scrapbooking. in old movies from the last century, criminals blackmail their victims by writing anonymous letters. to do that, they would cut out characters from some magazine or newspapers, and paste the characters onto the letter so their handwriting will not be revealed. we use a string to represent a letter. we also represent a magazine by a string. design an algorithm that takes an anonymous letter (a string) and a magazine (a string) as inputs, and returns a boolean value indicating if it is possible to construct the anonymous letter using characters from the magazine. analyze the running time of your algorithm. hint: do remember that we now live in the era of globalization: you cannot assume that there are only 26 characters. for example, java characters are encoded in the unicode standard, which is capable of representing cjk characters (chinese/japanese/korean). in short, the universe of characters is vast.

Answer 1

To determine if it is possible to construct an anonymous letter using characters from a magazine, create a frequency counter for the characters in the magazine and then check if the frequency counter has enough characters to match those in the anonymous letter.

Step-by-step explanation:

To design an algorithm that determines if it is possible to construct the anonymous letter using characters from the magazine, we can use a frequency counter technique. First, we create a frequency counter for the characters in the magazine string. Then, we iterate through the characters in the anonymous letter string and decrement the frequency counter for each character found. If at any point the frequency counter becomes negative or the character is not found in the frequency counter, we return False indicating that it is not possible to construct the anonymous letter. If the iteration completes without any issues, we return True indicating that it is possible to construct the anonymous letter using characters from the magazine.

The algorithm has a time complexity of O(n + m), where n is the length of the magazine string and m is the length of the anonymous letter string. This is because we iterate through both strings once to create the frequency counter and check for character availability.