Consider a square in the xy-plane, and let A (an “assassin”) and T (a “target”) be two arbitrary-but-fixed points within the square. Suppose that the square behaves like a billiard table, so that any ray (a.k.a “shot”) from the assassin will bounce off the sides of the square, with the angle of incidence equaling the angle of reflection.
Puzzle: Is it possible to block any possible shot from A to T by placing a finite number of points in the square?
This puzzle found its way to me through Tai-Danae’s video, via category theorist Emily Riehl, via a talk by the recently deceased Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, who studied the problem in more generality. I’m not familiar with her work, but knowing mathematicians it’s probably set in an arbitrary complex $ n$-manifold.
See Tai-Danae’s post for a proof, which left such an impression on me I had to dig deeper. In this post I’ll discuss a visualization I made—now posted at the end of Tai-Danae’s article—as well as here and below (to avoid spoilers). In the visualization, mouse movement chooses the firing direction for the assassin, and the target is in green. Dragging the target with the mouse updates the position of the guards. The source code is on Github.
Outline
The visualization uses d3 library, which was made for visualizations that dynamically update with data. I use it because it can draw SVGs real nice.
The meat of the visualization is in two geometric functions.
Both of these functions, along with all the geometry that supports them, is in geometry.js. The rest of the demo is defined in main.js, in which I oafishly trample over d3 best practices to arrive miraculously at a working product. Critiques welcome 🙂
As with most programming and software problems, the key to implementing these functions while maintaining your sanity is breaking it down into manageable pieces. Incrementalism is your friend.
Vectors, rays, rectangles, and ray splitting
We start at the bottom with a Vector class with helpful methods for adding, scaling, and computing norms and inner products.
This allows one to compute the distance between two points, e.g., with vector.subtract(otherVector).norm().
Next we define a class for a ray, which is represented by its center (a vector) and a direction (a vector).
class Ray {
constructor(center, direction, length=100000) {
this.center = center;
this.length = length;
if (direction.x == 0 && direction.y == 0) {
throw "Can't have zero direction";
}
this.direction = direction.normalized();
}
endpoint() {
return this.center.add(this.direction.scale(this.length));
}
intersects(point) {
let shiftedPoint = point.subtract(this.center);
let signedLength = innerProduct(shiftedPoint, this.direction);
let projectedVector = this.direction.scale(signedLength);
let differenceVector = shiftedPoint.subtract(projectedVector);
if (signedLength > 0
&& this.length > signedLength
&& differenceVector.norm() < intersectionRadius) {
return projectedVector.add(this.center);
} else {
return null;
}
}
}
The ray must be finite for us to draw it, but the length we've chosen is so large that, as you can see in the visualization, it's effectively infinite. Feel free to scale it up even longer.
The interesting bit is the intersection function. We want to compute whether a ray intersects a point. To do this, we use the inner product as a decision rule to compute the distance of a point from a line. If that distance is very small, we say they intersect.
In our demo points are not infinitesimal, but rather have a small radius described by intersectionRadius. For the sake of being able to see anything we set this to 3 pixels. If it’s too small the demo will look bad. The ray won’t stop when it should appear to stop, and it can appear to hit the target when it doesn’t.
Next up we have a class for a Rectangle, which is where the magic happens. The boilerplate and helper methods:
The function rayToPoints that splits a ray into line segments from bouncing depends on three helper functions:
rayIntersection: Compute the intersection point of a ray with the rectangle.
isOnVerticalWall: Determine if a point is on a vertical or horizontal wall of the rectangle, raising an error if neither.
splitRay: Split a ray into a line segment and a shorter ray that’s “bounced” off the wall of the rectangle.
(2) is trivial, computing some x- and y-coordinate distances up to some error tolerance. (1) involves parameterizing the ray and checking one of four inequalities. If the bottom left of the rectangle is $ (x_1, y_1)$ and the top right is $ (x_2, y_2)$ and the ray is written as $ \{ (c_1 + t v_1, c_2 + t v_2) \mid t > 0 \}$, then—with some elbow grease—the following four equations provide all possibilities, with some special cases for vertical or horizontal rays:
$ \displaystyle \begin{aligned} c_2 + t v_2 &= y_2 & \textup{ and } \hspace{2mm} & x_1 \leq c_1 + t v_1 \leq x_2 & \textup{ (intersects top)} \\ c_2 + t v_2 &= y_1 & \textup{ and } \hspace{2mm} & x_1 \leq c_1 + t v_1 \leq x_2 & \textup{ (intersects bottom)} \\ c_1 + t v_1 &= x_1 & \textup{ and } \hspace{2mm} & y_1 \leq c_2 + t v_2 \leq y_2 & \textup{ (intersects left)} \\ c_1 + t v_1 &= x_2 & \textup{ and } \hspace{2mm} & y_1 \leq c_2 + t v_2 \leq y_2 & \textup{ (intersects right)} \\ \end{aligned}$
In code:
rayIntersection(ray) {
let c1 = ray.center.x;
let c2 = ray.center.y;
let v1 = ray.direction.x;
let v2 = ray.direction.y;
let x1 = this.bottomLeft.x;
let y1 = this.bottomLeft.y;
let x2 = this.topRight.x;
let y2 = this.topRight.y;
// ray is vertically up or down
if (epsilon > Math.abs(v1)) {
return new Vector(c1, (v2 > 0 ? y2 : y1));
}
// ray is horizontally left or right
if (epsilon > Math.abs(v2)) {
return new Vector((v1 > 0 ? x2 : x1), c2);
}
let tTop = (y2 - c2) / v2;
let tBottom = (y1 - c2) / v2;
let tLeft = (x1 - c1) / v1;
let tRight = (x2 - c1) / v1;
// Exactly one t value should be both positive and result in a point
// within the rectangle
let tValues = [tTop, tBottom, tLeft, tRight];
for (let i = 0; i epsilon && this.contains(intersection)) {
return intersection;
}
}
throw "Unexpected error: ray never intersects rectangle!";
}
Next, splitRay splits a ray into a single line segment and the “remaining” ray, by computing the ray’s intersection with the rectangle, and having the “remaining” ray mirror the direction of approach with a new center that lies on the wall of the rectangle. The new ray length is appropriately shorter. If we run out of ray length, we simply return a segment with a null ray.
splitRay(ray) {
let segment = [ray.center, this.rayIntersection(ray)];
let segmentLength = segment[0].subtract(segment[1]).norm();
let remainingLength = ray.length - segmentLength;
if (remainingLength < 10) {
return {
segment: [ray.center, ray.endpoint()],
ray: null
};
}
let vertical = this.isOnVerticalWall(segment[1]);
let newRayDirection = null;
if (vertical) {
newRayDirection = new Vector(-ray.direction.x, ray.direction.y);
} else {
newRayDirection = new Vector(ray.direction.x, -ray.direction.y);
}
let newRay = new Ray(segment[1], newRayDirection, length=remainingLength);
return {
segment: segment,
ray: newRay
};
}
As you have probably guessed, rayToPoints simply calls splitRay over and over again until the ray hits an input “stopping point”—a guard, the target, or the assassin—or else our finite ray length has been exhausted. The output is a list of points, starting from the original ray’s center, for which adjacent pairs are interpreted as line segments to draw.
rayToPoints(ray, stoppingPoints) {
let points = [ray.center];
let remainingRay = ray;
while (remainingRay) {
// check if the ray would hit any guards or the target
if (stoppingPoints) {
let hardStops = stoppingPoints.map(p => remainingRay.intersects(p))
.filter(p => p != null);
if (hardStops.length > 0) {
// find first intersection and break
let closestStop = remainingRay.closestToCenter(hardStops);
points.push(closestStop);
break;
}
}
let rayPieces = this.splitRay(remainingRay);
points.push(rayPieces.segment[1]);
remainingRay = rayPieces.ray;
}
return points;
}
That’s sufficient to draw the shot emanating from the assassin. This method is called every time the mouse moves.
Optimal guards
The function to compute the optimal position of the guards takes as input the containing rectangle, the assassin, and the target, and produces as output a list of 16 points.
/*
* Compute the 16 optimal guards to prevent the assassin from hitting the
* target.
*/
function computeOptimalGuards(square, assassin, target) {
...
}
If you read Tai-Danae’s proof, you’ll know that this construction is to
Compute mirrors of the target across the top, the right, and the top+right of the rectangle. Call this resulting thing the 4-mirrored-targets.
Replicate the 4-mirrored-targets four times, by translating three of the copies left by the entire width of the 4-mirrored-targets shape, down by the entire height, and both left-and-down.
Now you have 16 copies of the target, and one assassin. This gives 16 line segments from assassin-to-target-copy. Place a guard at the midpoint of each of these line segments.
Finally, apply the reverse translation and reverse mirroring to return the guards to the original square.
Due to WordPress being a crappy blogging platform I need to migrate off of, the code snippets below have been magically disappearing. I’ve included links to github lines as well.
Step 1 (after adding simple helper functions on Rectangle to do the mirroring):
// First compute the target copies in the 4 mirrors
let target1 = target.copy();
let target2 = square.mirrorTop(target);
let target3 = square.mirrorRight(target);
let target4 = square.mirrorTop(square.mirrorRight(target));
target1.guardLabel = 1;
target2.guardLabel = 2;
target3.guardLabel = 3;
target4.guardLabel = 4;
// for each mirrored target, compute the four two-square-length translates
let mirroredTargets = [target1, target2, target3, target4];
let horizontalShift = 2 * square.width();
let verticalShift = 2 * square.height();
let translateLeft = new Vector(-horizontalShift, 0);
let translateRight = new Vector(horizontalShift, 0);
let translateUp = new Vector(0, verticalShift);
let translateDown = new Vector(0, -verticalShift);
let translatedTargets = [];
for (let i = 0; i < mirroredTargets.length; i++) {
let target = mirroredTargets[i];
translatedTargets.push([
target,
target.add(translateLeft),
target.add(translateDown),
target.add(translateLeft).add(translateDown),
]);
}
// compute the midpoints between the assassin and each translate
let translatedMidpoints = [];
for (let i = 0; i t.midpoint(assassin)));
}
Step 4, returning the guards back to the original square, is harder than it seems, because the midpoint of an assassin-to-target-copy segment might not be in the same copy of the square as the target-copy being fired at. This means you have to detect which square copy the midpoint lands in, and use that to determine which operations are required to invert. This results in the final block of this massive function.
// determine which of the four possible translates the midpoint is in
// and reverse the translation. Since midpoints can end up in completely
// different copies of the square, we have to check each one for all cases.
function untranslate(point) {
if (point.x square.bottomLeft.y) {
return point.add(translateRight);
} else if (point.x >= square.bottomLeft.x && point.y <= square.bottomLeft.y) {
return point.add(translateUp);
} else if (point.x < square.bottomLeft.x && point.y <= square.bottomLeft.y) {
return point.add(translateRight).add(translateUp);
} else {
return point;
}
}
// undo the translations to get the midpoints back to the original 4-mirrored square.
let untranslatedMidpoints = [];
for (let i = 0; i square.topRight.x && point.y > square.topRight.y) {
return square.mirrorTop(square.mirrorRight(point));
} else if (point.x > square.topRight.x && point.y <= square.topRight.y) {
return square.mirrorRight(point);
} else if (point.x square.topRight.y) {
return square.mirrorTop(point);
} else {
return point;
}
}
return untranslatedMidpoints.map(unmirror);
And that’s all there is to it!
Improvements, if I only had the time
There are a few improvements I’d like to make to this puzzle, but haven’t made the time (I’m writing a book, after all!).
Be able to drag the guards around.
Create new guards from an empty set of guards, with a button to “reveal” the solution.
Include a toggle that, when pressed, darkens the entire region of the square that can be hit by the assassin. For example, this would allow you to see if the target is in the only possible safe spot, or if there are multiple safe spots for a given configuration.
Perhaps darken the vulnerable spots by the number of possible paths that hit it, up to some limit.
The most complicated one: generalize to an arbitrary polygon (convex or not!), for which there may be no optional solution. The visualization would allow you to look for a solution using 2-4.
Pull requests are welcome if you attempt any of these improvements.
The standard inner product of two vectors has some nice geometric properties. Given two vectors $ x, y \in \mathbb{R}^n$, where by $ x_i$ I mean the $ i$-th coordinate of $ x$, the standard inner product (which I will interchangeably call the dot product) is defined by the formula
This formula, simple as it is, produces a lot of interesting geometry. An important such property, one which is discussed in machine learning circles more than pure math, is that it is a very convenient decision rule.
In particular, say we’re in the Euclidean plane, and we have a line $ L$ passing through the origin, with $ w$ being a unit vector perpendicular to $ L$ (“the normal” to the line).
If you take any vector $ x$, then the dot product $ \langle x, w \rangle$ is positive if $ x$ is on the same side of $ L$ as $ w$, and negative otherwise. The dot product is zero if and only if $ x$ is exactly on the line $ L$, including when $ x$ is the zero vector.
Left: the dot product of $ w$ and $ x$ is positive, meaning they are on the same side of $ w$. Right: The dot product is negative, and they are on opposite sides.
Here is an interactive demonstration of this property. Click the image below to go to the demo, and you can drag the vector arrowheads and see the decision rule change.
It’s always curious, at first, that multiplying and summing produces such geometry. Why should this seemingly trivial arithmetic do anything useful at all?
The core fact that makes it work, however, is that the dot product tells you how one vector projects onto another. When I say “projecting” a vector $ x$ onto another vector $ w$, I mean you take only the components of $ x$ that point in the direction of $ w$. The demo shows what the result looks like using the red (or green) vector.
In two dimensions this is easy to see, as you can draw the triangle which has $ x$ as the hypotenuse, with $ w$ spanning one of the two legs of the triangle as follows:
If we call $ a$ the (vector) leg of the triangle parallel to $ w$, while $ b$ is the dotted line (as a vector, parallel to $ L$), then as vectors $ x = a + b$. The projection of $ x$ onto $ w$ is just $ a$.
Another way to think of this is that the projection is $ x$, modified by removing any part of $ x$ that is perpendicular to $ w$. Using some colorful language: you put your hands on either side of $ x$ and $ w$, and then you squish $ x$ onto $ w$ along the line perpendicular to $ w$ (i.e., along $ b$).
And if $ w$ is a unit vector, then the length of $ a$—that is, the length of the projection of $ x$ onto $ w$—is exactly the inner product product $ \langle x, w \rangle$.
Moreover, if the angle between $ x$ and $ w$ is larger than 90 degrees, the projected vector will point in the opposite direction of $ w$, so it’s really a “signed” length.
Left: the projection points in the same direction as $ w$. Right: the projection points in the opposite direction.
And this is precisely why the decision rule works. This 90-degree boundary is the line perpendicular to $ w$.
More technically said: Let $ x, y \in \mathbb{R}^n$ be two vectors, and $ \langle x,y \rangle $ their dot product. Define by $ \| y \|$ the length of $ y$, specifically $ \sqrt{\langle y, y \rangle}$. Define by $ \text{proj}_{y}(x)$ by first letting $ y’ = \frac{y}{\| y \|}$, and then let $ \text{proj}_{y}(x) = \langle x,y’ \rangle y’$. In words, you scale $ y$ to a unit vector $ y’$, use the result to compute the inner product, and then scale $ y$ so that it’s length is $ \langle x, y’ \rangle$. Then
Theorem: Geometrically, $ \text{proj}_y(x)$ is the projection of $ x$ onto the line spanned by $ y$.
This theorem is true for any $ n$-dimensional vector space, since if you have two vectors you can simply apply the reasoning for 2-dimensions to the 2-dimensional plane containing $ x$ and $ y$. In that case, the decision boundary for a positive/negative output is the entire $ n-1$ dimensional hyperplane perpendicular to $ y$ (the projected vector).
In fact, the usual formula for the angle between two vectors, i.e. the formula $ \langle x, y \rangle = \|x \| \cdot \| y \| \cos \theta$, is a restatement of the projection theorem in terms of trigonometry. The $ \langle x, y’ \rangle$ part of the projection formula (how much you scale the output) is equal to $ \| x \| \cos \theta$. At the end of this post we have a proof of the cosine-angle formula above.
Part of why this decision rule property is so important is that this is a linear function, and linear functions can be optimized relatively easily. When I say that, I specifically mean that there are many known algorithms for optimizing linear functions, which don’t have obscene runtime or space requirements. This is a big reason why mathematicians and statisticians start the mathematical modeling process with linear functions. They’re inherently simpler.
In fact, there are many techniques in machine learning—a prominent one is the so-called Kernel Trick—that exist solely to take data that is not inherently linear in nature (cannot be fruitfully analyzed by linear methods) and transform it into a dataset that is. Using the Kernel Trick as an example to foreshadow some future posts on Support Vector Machines, the idea is to take data which cannot be separated by a line, and transform it (usually by adding new coordinates) so that it can. Then the decision rule, computed in the larger space, is just a dot product. Irene Papakonstantinou neatly demonstrates this with paper folding and scissors. The tradeoff is that the size of the ambient space increases, and it might increase so much that it makes computation intractable. Luckily, the Kernel Trick avoids this by remembering where the data came from, so that one can take advantage of the smaller space to compute what would be the inner product in the larger space.
Next time we’ll see how this decision rule shows up in an optimization problem: finding the “best” hyperplane that separates an input set of red and blue points into monochromatic regions (provided that is possible). Finding this separator is core subroutine of the Support Vector Machine technique, and therein lie interesting algorithms. After we see the core SVM algorithm, we’ll see how the Kernel Trick fits into the method to allow nonlinear decision boundaries.
Proof of the cosine angle formula
Theorem: The inner product $ \langle v, w \rangle$ is equal to $ \| v \| \| w \| \cos(\theta)$, where $ \theta$ is the angle between the two vectors.
Note that this angle is computed in the 2-dimensional subspace spanned by $ v, w$, viewed as a typical flat plane, and this is a 2-dimensional plane regardless of the dimension of $ v, w$.
Proof. If either $ v$ or $ w$ is zero, then both sides of the equation are zero and the theorem is trivial, so we may assume both are nonzero. Label a triangle with sides $ v,w$ and the third side $ v-w$. Now the length of each side is $ \| v \|, \| w\|,$ and $ \| v-w \|$, respectively. Assume for the moment that $ \theta$ is not 0 or 180 degrees, so that this triangle is not degenerate.
$ \displaystyle \| v – w \|^2 = \| v \|^2 + \| w \|^2 – 2 \| v \| \| w \| \cos(\theta)$
Moreover, The left hand side is the inner product of $ v-w$ with itself, i.e. $ \| v – w \|^2 = \langle v-w , v-w \rangle$. We’ll expand $ \langle v-w, v-w \rangle$ using two facts. The first is trivial from the formula, that inner product is symmetric: $ \langle v,w \rangle = \langle w, v \rangle$. Second is that the inner product is linear in each input. In particular for the first input: $ \langle x + y, z \rangle = \langle x, z \rangle + \langle y, z \rangle$ and $ \langle cx, z \rangle = c \langle x, z \rangle$. The same holds for the second input by symmetry of the two inputs. Hence we can split up $ \langle v-w, v-w \rangle$ as follows.
$ \displaystyle \begin{aligned} \langle v-w, v-w \rangle &= \langle v, v-w \rangle – \langle w, v-w \rangle \\ &= \langle v, v \rangle – \langle v, w \rangle – \langle w, v \rangle + \langle w, w \rangle \\ &= \| v \|^2 – 2 \langle v, w \rangle + \| w \|^2 \\ \end{aligned}$
Combining our two offset equations, we can subtract $ \| v \|^2 + \| w \|^2$ from each side and get
Which, after dividing by $ -2$, proves the theorem if $ \theta \not \in \{0, 180 \}$.
Now if $ \theta = 0$ or 180 degrees, the vectors are parallel, so we can write one as a scalar multiple of the other. Say $ w = cv$ for $ c \in \mathbb{R}$. In that case, $ \langle v, cv \rangle = c \| v \| \| v \|$. Now $ \| w \| = | c | \| v \|$, since a norm is a length and is hence non-negative (but $ c$ can be negative). Indeed, if $ v, w$ are parallel but pointing in opposite directions, then $ c < 0$, so $ \cos(\theta) = -1$, and $ c \| v \| = – \| w \|$. Otherwise $ c > 0$ and $ \cos(\theta) = 1$. This allows us to write $ c \| v \| \| v \| = \| w \| \| v \| \cos(\theta)$, and this completes the final case of the theorem.
Last time we made a quick tour through the main theorems of Claude Shannon, which essentially solved the following two problems about communicating over a digital channel.
What is the best encoding for information when you are guaranteed that your communication channel is error free?
Are there any encoding schemes that can recover from random noise introduced during transmission?
The answers to these questions were purely mathematical theorems, of course. But the interesting shortcoming of Shannon’s accomplishment was that his solution for the noisy coding problem (2) was nonconstructive. The question remains: can we actually come up with efficiently computable encoding schemes? The answer is yes! Marcel Golay was the first to discover such a code in 1949 (just a year after Shannon’s landmark paper), and Golay’s construction was published on a single page! We’re not going to define Golay’s code in this post, but we will mention its interesting status in coding theory later. The next year Richard Hamming discovered another simpler and larger family of codes, and went on to do some of the major founding work in coding theory. For his efforts he won a Turing Award and played a major part in bringing about the modern digital age. So we’ll start with Hamming’s codes.
We will assume some basic linear algebra knowledge, as detailed our first linear algebra primer. We will also use some basic facts about polynomials and finite fields, though the lazy reader can just imagine everything as binary $ \{ 0,1 \}$ and still grok the important stuff.
Richard Hamming, inventor of Hamming codes. [image source]
What is a code?
The formal definition of a code is simple: a code $ C$ is just a subset of $ \{ 0,1 \}^n$ for some $ n$. Elements of $ C$ are called codewords.
This is deceptively simple, but here’s the intuition. Say we know we want to send messages of length $ k$, so that our messages are in $ \{ 0,1 \}^k$. Then we’re really viewing a code $ C$ as the image of some encoding function $ \textup{Enc}: \{ 0,1 \}^k \to \{ 0,1 \}^n$. We can define $ C$ by just describing what the set is, or we can define it by describing the encoding function. Either way, we will make sure that $ \textup{Enc}$ is an injective function, so that no two messages get sent to the same codeword. Then $ |C| = 2^k$, and we can call $ k = \log |C|$ the message length of $ C$ even if we don’t have an explicit encoding function.
Moreover, while in this post we’ll always work with $ \{ 0,1 \}$, the alphabet of your encoded messages could be an arbitrary set $ \Sigma$. So then a code $ C$ would be a subset of tuples in $ \Sigma^n$, and we would call $ q = |\Sigma|$.
So we have these parameters $ n, k, q$, and we need one more. This is the minimum distance of a code, which we’ll denote by $ d$. This is defined to be the minimum Hamming distance between all distinct pairs of codewords, where by Hamming distance I just mean the number of coordinates that two tuples differ in. Recalling the remarks we made last time about Shannon’s nonconstructive proof, when we decode an encoded message $ y$ (possibly with noisy bits) we look for the (unencoded) message $ x$ whose encoding $ \textup{Enc}(x)$ is as close to $ y$ as possible. This will only work in the worst case if all pairs of codewords are sufficiently far apart. Hence we track the minimum distance of a code.
So coding theorists turn this mess of parameters into notation.
Definition: A code $ C$ is called an $ (n, k, d)_q$-code if
$ C \subset \Sigma^n$ for some alphabet $ \Sigma$,
$ k = \log |C|$,
$ C$ has minimum distance $ d$, and
the alphabet $ \Sigma$ has size $ q$.
The basic goals of coding theory are:
For which values of these four parameters do codes exist?
Fixing any three parameters, how can we optimize the other one?
In this post we’ll see how simple linear-algebraic constructions can give optima for one of these problems, optimizing $ k$ for $ d=3$, and we’ll state a characterization theorem for optimizing $ k$ for a general $ d$. Next time we’ll continue with a second construction that optimizes a different bound called the Singleton bound.
Linear codes and the Hamming code
A code is called linear if it can be identified with a linear subspace of some finite-dimensional vector space. In this post all of our vector spaces will be $ \{ 0,1 \}^n$, that is tuples of bits under addition mod 2. But you can do the same constructions with any finite scalar field $ \mathbb{F}_q$ for a prime power $ q$, i.e. have your vector space be $ \mathbb{F}_q^n$. We’ll go back and forth between describing a binary code $ q=2$ over $ \{ 0,1 \}$ and a code in $\mathbb{F}_q^n$. So to say a code is linear means:
The zero vector is a codeword.
The sum of any two codewords is a codeword.
Any scalar multiple of a codeword is a codeword.
Linear codes are the simplest kinds of codes, but already they give a rich variety of things to study. The benefit of linear codes is that you can describe them in a lot of different and useful ways besides just describing the encoding function. We’ll use two that we define here. The idea is simple: you can describe everything about a linear subspace by giving a basis for the space.
Definition: A generator matrix of a $ (n,k,d)_q$-code $ C$ is a $ k \times n$ matrix $ G$ whose rows form a basis for $ C$.
There are a lot of equivalent generator matrices for a linear code (we’ll come back to this later), but the main benefit is that having a generator matrix allows one to encode messages $ x \in \{0,1 \}^k$ by left multiplication $ xG$. Intuitively, we can think of the bits of $ x$ as describing the coefficients of the chosen linear combination of the rows of $ G$, which uniquely describes an element of the subspace. Note that because a $ k$-dimensional subspace of $ \{ 0,1 \}^n$ has $ 2^k$ elements, we’re not abusing notation by calling $ k = \log |C|$ both the message length and the dimension.
For the second description of $ C$, we’ll remind the reader that every linear subspace $ C$ has a unique orthogonal complement $ C^\perp$, which is the subspace of vectors that are orthogonal to vectors in $ C$.
Definition: Let $ H^T$ be a generator matrix for $ C^\perp$. Then $ H$ is called a parity check matrix.
Note $ H$ has the basis for $ C^\perp$ as columns. This means it has dimensions $ n \times (n-k)$. Moreover, it has the property that $ x \in C$ if and only if the left multiplication $ xH = 0$. Having zero dot product with all columns of $ H$ characterizes membership in $ C$.
The benefit of having a parity check matrix is that you can do efficient error detection: just compute $ yH$ on your received message $ y$, and if it’s nonzero there was an error! What if there were so many errors, and just the right errors that $ y$ coincided with a different codeword than it started? Then you’re screwed. In other words, the parity check matrix is only guarantee to detect errors if you have fewer errors than the minimum distance of your code.
So that raises an obvious question: if you give me the generator matrix of a linear code can I compute its minimum distance? It turns out that this problem is NP-hard in general. In fact, you can show that this is equivalent to finding the smallest linearly dependent set of rows of the parity check matrix, and it is easier to see why such a problem might be hard. But if you construct your codes cleverly enough you can compute their distance properties with ease.
Before we do that, one more definition and a simple proposition about linear codes. The Hamming weight of a vector $ x$, denoted $ wt(x)$, is the number of nonzero entries in $ x$.
Proposition: The minimum distance of a linear code $ C$ is the minimum Hamming weight over all nonzero vectors $ x \in C$.
Proof. Consider a nonzero $ x \in C$. On one hand, the zero vector is a codeword and $ wt(x)$ is by definition the Hamming distance between $ x$ and zero, so it is an upper bound on the minimum distance. In fact, it’s also a lower bound: if $ x,y$ are two nonzero codewords, then $ x-y$ is also a codeword and $ wt(x-y)$ is the Hamming distance between $ x$ and $ y$.
$ \square$
So now we can define our first code, the Hamming code. It will be a $ (n, k, 3)_2$-code. The construction is quite simple. We have fixed $ d=3, q=2$, and we will also fix $ l = n-k$. One can think of this as fixing $ n$ and maximizing $ k$, but it will only work for $ n$ of a special form.
We’ll construct the Hamming code by describing a parity-check matrix $ H$. In fact, we’re going to see what conditions the minimum distance $ d=3$ imposes on $ H$, and find out those conditions are actually sufficient to get $ d=3$. We’ll start with 2. If we want to ensure $ d \geq 2$, then you need it to be the case that no nonzero vector of Hamming weight 1 is a code word. Indeed, if $ e_i$ is a vector with all zeros except a one in position $ i$, then $ e_i H = h_i$ is the $ i$-th row of $ H$. We need $ e_i H \neq 0$, so this imposes the condition that no row of $ H$ can be zero. It’s easy to see that this is sufficient for $ d \geq 2$.
Likewise for $ d \geq 3$, given a vector $ y = e_i + e_j$ for some positions $ i \neq j$, then $ yH = h_i + h_j$ may not be zero. But because our sums are mod 2, saying that $ h_i + h_j \neq 0$ is the same as saying $ h_i \neq h_j$. Again it’s an if and only if. So we have the two conditions.
No row of $ H$ may be zero.
All rows of $ H$ must be distinct.
That is, any parity check matrix with those two properties defines a distance 3 linear code. The only question that remains is how large can $ n$ be if the vectors have length $ n-k = l$? That’s just the number of distinct nonzero binary strings of length $ l$, which is $ 2^l – 1$. Picking any way to arrange these strings as the rows of a matrix (say, in lexicographic order) gives you a good parity check matrix.
Theorem: For every $ l > 0$, there is a $ (2^l – 1, 2^l – l – 1, 3)_2$-code called the Hamming code.
Since the Hamming code has distance 3, we can always detect if at most a single error occurs. Moreover, we can correct a single error using the Hamming code. If $ x \in C$ and $ wt(e) = 1$ is an error bit in position $ i$, then the incoming message would be $ y = x + e$. Now compute $ yH = xH + eH = 0 + eH = h_i$ and flip bit $ i$ of $ y$. That is, whichever row of $ H$ you get tells you the index of the error, so you can flip the corresponding bit and correct it. If you order the rows lexicographically like we said, then $ h_i = i$ as a binary number. Very slick.
Before we move on, we should note one interesting feature of linear codes.
Definition: A code is called systematic if it can be realized by an encoding function that appends some number $ n-k$ “check bits” to the end of each message.
The interesting feature is that all linear codes are systematic. The reason is as follows. The generator matrix $ G$ of a linear code has as rows a basis for the code as a linear subspace. We can perform Gaussian elimination on $ G$ and get a new generator matrix that looks like $ [I \mid A]$ where $ I$ is the identity matrix of the appropriate size and $ A$ is some junk. The point is that encoding using this generator matrix leaves the message unchanged, and adds a bunch of bits to the end that are determined by $ A$. It’s a different encoding function on $ \{ 0,1\}^k$, but it has the same image in $ \{ 0,1 \}^n$, i.e. the code is unchanged. Gaussian elimination just performed a change of basis.
If you work out the parameters of the Hamming code, you’ll see that it is a systematic code which adds $ \Theta(\log n)$ check bits to a message, and we’re able to correct a single error in this code. An obvious question is whether this is necessary? Could we get away with adding fewer check bits? The answer is no, and a simple “information theoretic” argument shows this. A single index out of $ n$ requires $ \log n$ bits to describe, and being able to correct a single error is like identifying a unique index. Without logarithmically many bits, you just don’t have enough information.
The Hamming bound and perfect codes
One nice fact about Hamming codes is that they optimize a natural problem: the problem of maximizing $ d$ given a fixed choice of $ n$, $ k$, and $ q$. To get this let’s define $ V_n(r)$ denote the volume of a ball of radius $ r$ in the space $ \mathbb{F}_2^n$. I.e., if you fix any string (doesn’t matter which) $ x$, $ V_n(r)$ is the size of the set $ \{ y : d(x,y) \leq r \}$, where $ d(x,y)$ is the hamming distance.
There is a theorem called the Hamming bound, which describes a limit to how much you can pack disjoint balls of radius $ r$ inside $ \mathbb{F}_2^n$.
Proof. The proof is quite simple. To say a code $ C$ has distance $ d$ means that for every string $ x \in C$ there is no other string $ y$ within Hamming distance $ d$ of $ x$. In other words, the balls centered around both $ x,y$ of radius $ r = \lfloor (d-1)/2 \rfloor$ are disjoint. The extra difference of one is for odd $ d$, e.g. when $ d=3$ you need balls of radius 1 to guarantee no overlap. Now $ |C| = 2^k$, so the total number of strings covered by all these balls is the left-hand side of the expression. But there are at most $ 2^n$ strings in $ \mathbb{F}_2^n$, establishing the desired inequality.
$ \square$
Now a code is called perfect if it actually meets the Hamming bound exactly. As you probably guessed, the Hamming codes are perfect codes. It’s not hard to prove this, and I’m leaving it as an exercise to the reader.
The obvious follow-up question is whether there are any other perfect codes. The answer is yes, some of which are nonlinear. But some of them are “trivial.” For example, when $ d=1$ you can just use the identity encoding to get the code $ C = \mathbb{F}_2^n$. You can also just have a code which consists of a single codeword. There are also some codes that encode by repeating the message multiple times. These are called “repetition codes,” and all three of these examples are called trivial (as a definition). Now there are some nontrivial and nonlinear perfect codes I won’t describe here, but here is the nice characterization theorem.
Theorem [van Lint ’71, Tietavainen ‘73]: Let $ C$ be a nontrivial perfect $ (n,d,k)_q$ code. Then the parameters must either be that of a Hamming code, or one of the two:
A $ (23, 12, 7)_2$-code
A $ (11, 6, 5)_3$-code
The last two examples are known as the binary and ternary Golay codes, respectively, which are also linear. In other words, every possible set of parameters for a perfect code can be realized as one of these three linear codes.
So this theorem was a big deal in coding theory. The Hamming and Golay codes were both discovered within a year of each other, in 1949 and 1950, but the nonexistence of other perfect linear codes was open for twenty more years. This wrapped up a very neat package.
Next time we’ll discuss the Singleton bound, which optimizes for a different quantity and is incomparable with perfect codes. We’ll define the Reed-Solomon and show they optimize this bound as well. These codes are particularly famous for being the error correcting codes used in DVDs. We’ll then discuss the algorithmic issues surrounding decoding, and more recent connections to complexity theory.
In the last post in this series we saw some simple examples of linear programs, derived the concept of a dual linear program, and saw the duality theorem and the complementary slackness conditions which give a rough sketch of the stopping criterion for an algorithm. This time we’ll go ahead and write this algorithm for solving linear programs, and next time we’ll apply the algorithm to an industry-strength version of the nutrition problem we saw last time. The algorithm we’ll implement is called the simplex algorithm. It was the first algorithm for solving linear programs, invented in the 1940’s by George Dantzig, and it’s still the leading practical algorithm, and it was a key part of a Nobel Prize. It’s by far one of the most important algorithms ever devised.
The simplex algorithm can solve any kind of linear program, but it only accepts a special form of the program as input. So first we have to do some manipulations. Recall that the primal form of a linear program was the following minimization problem.
$ \min \left \langle c, x \right \rangle \\ \textup{s.t. } Ax \geq b, x \geq 0$
where the brackets mean “dot product.” And its dual is
$ \max \left \langle y, b \right \rangle \\ \textup{s.t. } A^Ty \leq c, y \geq 0$
The linear program can actually have more complicated constraints than just the ones above. In general, one might want to have “greater than” and “less than” constraints in the same problem. It turns out that this isn’t any harder, and moreover the simplex algorithm only uses equality constraints, and with some finicky algebra we can turn any set of inequality or equality constraints into a set of equality constraints.
We’ll call our goal the “standard form,” which is as follows:
$ \max \left \langle c, x \right \rangle \\ \textup{s.t. } Ax = b, x \geq 0$
It seems impossible to get the usual minimization/maximization problem into standard form until you realize there’s nothing stopping you from adding more variables to the problem. That is, say we’re given a constraint like:
$ \displaystyle x_7 + x_3 \leq 10,$
we can add a new variable $ \xi$, called a slack variable, so that we get an equality:
$ \displaystyle x_7 + x_3 + \xi = 10$
And now we can just impose that $ \xi \geq 0$. The idea is that $ \xi$ represents how much “slack” there is in the inequality, and you can always choose it to make the condition an equality. So if the equality holds and the variables are nonnegative, then the $ x_i$ will still satisfy their original inequality. For “greater than” constraints, we can do the same thing but subtract a nonnegative variable. Finally, if we have a minimization problem “$ \min z$” we can convert it to $ \max -z$.
So, to combine all of this together, if we have the following linear program with each kind of constraint,
We can add new variables $ \xi_1, \xi_2$, and write it as
By defining the vector variable $ x = (x_1, x_2, x_3, \xi_1, \xi_2)$ and $ c = (-1,-1,-1,0,0)$ and $ A$ to have $ -1, 0, 1$ as appropriately for the new variables, we see that the system is written in standard form.
This is the kind of tedious transformation we can automate with a program. Assuming there are $ n$ variables, the input consists of the vector $ c$ of length $ n$, and three matrix-vector pairs $ (A, b)$ representing the three kinds of constraints. It’s a bit annoying to describe, but the essential idea is that we compute a rectangular “identity” matrix whose diagonal entries are $ \pm 1$, and then join this with the original constraint matrix row-wise. The reader can see the full implementation in the Github repository for this post, though we won’t use this particular functionality in the algorithm that follows.
There are some other additional things we could do: for example there might be some variables that are completely unrestricted. What you do in this case is take an unrestricted variable $ z$ and replace it by the difference of two unrestricted variables $ z’ – z”$. For simplicity we’ll ignore this, but it would be a fruitful exercise for the reader to augment the function to account for these.
What happened to the slackness conditions?
The “standard form” of our linear program raises an obvious question: how can the complementary slackness conditions make sense if everything is an equality? It turns out that one can redo all the work one did for linear programs of the form we gave last time (minimize w.r.t. greater-than constraints) for programs in the new “standard form” above. We even get the same complementary slackness conditions! If you want to, you can do this entire routine quite a bit faster if you invoke the power of Lagrangians. We won’t do that here, but the tool shows up as a way to work with primal-dual conversions in many other parts of mathematics, so it’s a good buzzword to keep in mind.
In our case, the only difference with the complementary slackness conditions is that one of the two is trivial: $ \left \langle y^*, Ax^* – b \right \rangle = 0$. This is because if our candidate solution $ x^*$ is feasible, then it will have to satisfy $ Ax = b$ already. The other one, that $ \left \langle x^*, A^Ty^* – c \right \rangle = 0$, is the only one we need to worry about.
Again, the complementary slackness conditions give us inspiration here. Recall that, informally, they say that when a variable is used at all, it is used as much as it can be to fulfill its constraint (the corresponding dual constraint is tight). So a solution will correspond to a choice of some variables which are either used or not, and a choice of nonzero variables will correspond to a solution. We even saw this happen in the last post when we observed that broccoli trumps oranges. If we can get a good handle on how to navigate the set of these solutions, then we’ll have a nifty algorithm.
Let’s make this official and lay out our assumptions.
Extreme points and basic solutions
Remember that the graphical way to solve a linear program is to look at the line (or hyperplane) given by $ \langle c, x \rangle = q$ and keep increasing $ q$ (or decreasing it, if you are minimizing) until the very last moment when this line touches the region of feasible solutions. Also recall that the “feasible region” is just the set of all solutions to $ Ax = b$, that is the solutions that satisfy the constraints. We imagined this picture:
The constraints define a convex area of “feasible solutions.” Image source: Wikipedia.
With this geometric intuition it’s clear that there will always be an optimal solution on a vertex of the feasible region. These points are called extreme points of the feasible region. But because we will almost never work in the plane again (even introducing slack variables makes us relatively high dimensional!) we want an algebraic characterization of these extreme points.
If you have a little bit of practice with convex sets the correct definition is very natural. Recall that a set $ X$ is convex if for any two points $ x, y \in X$ every point on the line segment between $ x$ and $ y$ is also in $ X$. An algebraic way to say this (thinking of these points now as vectors) is that every point $ \delta x + (1-\delta) y \in X$ when $ 0 \leq \delta \leq 1$. Now an extreme point is just a point that isn’t on the inside of any such line, i.e. can’t be written this way for $ 0 < \delta < 1$. For example,
A convex set with extremal points in red. Image credit Wikipedia.
Another way to say this is that if $ z$ is an extreme point then whenever $ z$ can be written as $ \delta x + (1-\delta) y$ for some $ 0 < \delta < 1$, then actually $ x=y=z$. Now since our constraints are all linear (and there are a finite number of them) they won’t define a convex set with weird curves like the one above. This means that there are a finite number of extreme points that just correspond to the intersections of some of the constraints. So there are at most $ 2^n$ possibilities.
Indeed we want a characterization of extreme points that’s specific to linear programs in standard form, “$ \max \langle c, x \rangle \textup{ s.t. } Ax=b, x \geq 0$.” And here is one.
Definition: Let $ A$ be an $ m \times n$ matrix with $ n \geq m$. A solution $ x$ to $ Ax=b$ is called basic if at most $ m$ of its entries are nonzero.
The reason we call it “basic” is because, under some mild assumptions we describe below, a basic solution corresponds to a vector space basis of $ \mathbb{R}^m$. Which basis? The one given by the $ m$ columns of $ A$ used in the basic solution. We don’t need to talk about bases like this, though, so in the event of a headache just think of the basis as a set $ B \subset \{ 1, 2, \dots, n \}$ of size $ m$ corresponding to the nonzero entries of the basic solution.
Indeed, what we’re doing here is looking at the matrix $ A_B$ formed by taking the columns of $ A$ whose indices are in $ B$, and the vector $ x_B$ in the same way, and looking at the equation $ A_Bx_B = b$. If all the parts of $ x$ that we removed were zero then this will hold if and only if $ Ax=b$. One might worry that $ A_B$ is not invertible, so we’ll go ahead and assume it is. In fact, we’ll assume that every set of $ m$ columns of $ A$ forms a basis and that the rows of $ A$ are also linearly independent. This isn’t without loss of generality because if some rows or columns are not linearly independent, we can remove the offending constraints and variables without changing the set of solutions (this is why it’s so nice to work with the standard form).
Moreover, we’ll assume that every basic solution has exactly $ m$ nonzero variables. A basic solution which doesn’t satisfy this assumption is called degenerate, and they’ll essentially be special corner cases in the simplex algorithm. Finally, we call a basic solution feasible if (in addition to satisfying $ Ax=b$) it satisfies $ x \geq 0$. Now that we’ve made all these assumptions it’s easy to see that choosing $ m$ nonzero variables uniquely determines a basic feasible solution. Again calling the sub-matrix $ A_B$ for a basis $ B$, it’s just $ x_B = A_B^{-1}b$. Now to finish our characterization, we just have to show that under the same assumptions basic feasible solutions are exactly the extremal points of the feasible region.
Proposition: A vector $ x$ is a basic feasible solution if and only if it’s an extreme point of the set $ \{ x : Ax = b, x \geq 0 \}$.
Proof. For one direction, suppose you have a basic feasible solution $ x$, and say we write it as $ x = \delta y + (1-\delta) z$ for some $ 0 < \delta < 1$. We want to show that this implies $ y = z$. Since all of these points are in the feasible region, all of their coordinates are nonnegative. So whenever a coordinate $ x_i = 0$ it must be that both $ y_i = z_i = 0$. Since $ x$ has exactly $ n-m$ zero entries, it must be that $ y, z$ both have at least $ n-m$ zero entries, and hence $ y,z$ are both basic. By our non-degeneracy assumption they both then have exactly $ m$ nonzero entries. Let $ B$ be the set of the nonzero indices of $ x$. Because $ Ay = Az = b$, we have $ A(y-z) = 0$. Now $ y-z$ has all of its nonzero entries in $ B$, and because the columns of $ A_B$ are linearly independent, the fact that $ A_B(y-z) = 0$ implies $ y-z = 0$.
In the other direction, suppose that you have some extreme point $ x$ which is feasible but not basic. In other words, there are more than $ m$ nonzero entries of $ x$, and we’ll call the indices $ J = \{ j_1, \dots, j_t \}$ where $ t > m$. The columns of $ A_J$ are linearly dependent (since they’re $ t$ vectors in $ \mathbb{R}^m$), and so let $ \sum_{i=1}^t z_{j_i} A_{j_i}$ be a nontrivial linear combination of the columns of $ A$. Add zeros to make the $ z_{j_i}$ into a length $ n$ vector $ z$, so that $ Az = 0$. Now
And if we pick $ \varepsilon$ sufficiently small $ x \pm \varepsilon z$ will still be nonnegative, because the only entries we’re changing of $ x$ are the strictly positive ones. Then $ x = \delta (x + \varepsilon z) + (1 – \delta) \varepsilon z$ for $ \delta = 1/2$, but this is very embarrassing for $ x$ who was supposed to be an extreme point. $ \square$
Now that we know extreme points are the same as basic feasible solutions, we need to show that any linear program that has some solution has a basic feasible solution. This is clear geometrically: any time you have an optimum it has to either lie on a line or at a vertex, and if it lies on a line then you can slide it to a vertex without changing its value. Nevertheless, it is a useful exercise to go through the algebra.
Theorem. Whenever a linear program is feasible and bounded, it has a basic feasible solution.
Proof. Let $ x$ be an optimal solution to the LP. If $ x$ has at most $ m$ nonzero entries then it’s a basic solution and by the non-degeneracy assumption it must have exactly $ m$ nonzero entries. In this case there’s nothing to do, so suppose that $ x$ has $ r > m$ nonzero entries. It can’t be a basic feasible solution, and hence is not an extreme point of the set of feasible solutions (as proved by the last theorem). So write it as $ x = \delta y + (1-\delta) z$ for some feasible $ y \neq z$ and $ 0 < \delta < 1$.
The only thing we know about $ x$ is it’s optimal. Let $ c$ be the cost vector, and the optimality says that $ \langle c,x \rangle \geq \langle c,y \rangle$, and $ \langle c,x \rangle \geq \langle c,z \rangle$. We claim that in fact these are equal, that $ y, z$ are both optimal as well. Indeed, say $ y$ were not optimal, then
Which can be rearranged to show that $ \langle c,y \rangle < \langle c, z \rangle$. Unfortunately for $ x$, this implies that it was not optimal all along:
An identical argument works to show $ z$ is optimal, too. Now we claim we can use $ y,z$ to get a new solution that has fewer than $ r$ nonzero entries. Once we show this we’re done: inductively repeat the argument with the smaller solution until we get down to exactly $ m$ nonzero variables. As before we know that $ y,z$ must have at least as many zeros as $ x$. If they have more zeros we’re done. And if they have exactly as many zeros we can do the following trick. Write $ w = \gamma y + (1- \gamma)z$ for a $ \gamma \in \mathbb{R}$ we’ll choose later. Note that no matter the $ \gamma$, $ w$ is optimal. Rewriting $ w = z + \gamma (y-z)$, we just have to pick a $ \gamma$ that ensures one of the nonzero coefficients of $ z$ is zeroed out while maintaining nonnegativity. Indeed, we can just look at the index $ i$ which minimizes $ z_i / (y-z)_i$ and use $ \delta = – z_i / (y-z)_i$. $ \square$.
So we have an immediate (and inefficient) combinatorial algorithm: enumerate all subsets of size $ m$, compute the corresponding basic feasible solution $ x_B = A_B^{-1}b$, and see which gives the biggest objective value. The problem is that, even if we knew the value of $ m$, this would take time $ n^m$, and it’s not uncommon for $ m$ to be in the tens or hundreds (and if we don’t know $ m$ the trivial search is exponential).
So we have to be smarter, and this is where the simplex tableau comes in.
The simplex tableau
Now say you have any basis $ B$ and any feasible solution $ x$. For now $ x$ might not be a basic solution, and even if it is, its basis of nonzero entries might not be the same as $ B$. We can decompose the equation $ Ax = b$ into the basis part and the non basis part:
$ A_Bx_B + A_{B’} x_{B’} = b$
and solving the equation for $ x_B$ gives
$ x_B = A^{-1}_B(b – A_{B’} x_{B’})$
It may look like we’re making a wicked abuse of notation here, but both $ A_Bx_B$ and $ A_{B’}x_{B’}$ are vectors of length $ m$ so the dimensions actually do work out. Now our feasible solution $ x$ has to satisfy $ Ax = b$, and the entries of $ x$ are all nonnegative, so it must be that $ x_B \geq 0$ and $ x_{B’} \geq 0$, and by the equality above $ A^{-1}_B (b – A_{B’}x_{B’}) \geq 0$ as well. Now let’s write the maximization objective $ \langle c, x \rangle$ by expanding it first in terms of the $ x_B, x_{B’}$, and then expanding $ x_B$.
If we want to maximize the objective, we can just maximize this last line. There are two cases. In the first, the vector $ c_{B’} – (A^{-1}_B A_{B’})^T c_B \leq 0$ and $ A_B^{-1}b \geq 0$. In the above equation, this tells us that making any component of $ x_{B’}$ bigger will decrease the overall objective. In other words, $ \langle c, x \rangle \leq \langle c_B, A_B^{-1}b \rangle$. Picking $ x = A_B^{-1}b$ (with zeros in the non basis part) meets this bound and hence must be optimal. In other words, no matter what basis $ B$ we’ve chosen (i.e., no matter the candidate basic feasible solution), if the two conditions hold then we’re done.
Now the crux of the algorithm is the second case: if the conditions aren’t met, we can pick a positive index of $ c_{B’} – (A_B^{-1}A_{B’})^Tc_B$ and increase the corresponding value of $ x_{B’}$ to increase the objective value. As we do this, other variables in the solution will change as well (by decreasing), and we have to stop when one of them hits zero. In doing so, this changes the basis by removing one index and adding another. In reality, we’ll figure out how much to increase ahead of time, and the change will correspond to a single elementary row-operation in a matrix.
Indeed, the matrix we’ll use to represent all of this data is called a tableau in the literature. The columns of the tableau will correspond to variables, and the rows to constraints. The last row of the tableau will maintain a candidate solution $ y$ to the dual problem. Here’s a rough picture to keep the different parts clear while we go through the details.
But to make it work we do a slick trick, which is to “left-multiply everything” by $ A_B^{-1}$. In particular, if we have an LP given by $ c, A, b$, then for any basis it’s equivalent to the LP given by $ c, A_B^{-1}A, A_{B}^{-1} b$ (just multiply your solution to the new program by $ A_B$ to get a solution to the old one). And so the actual tableau will be of this form.
When we say it’s in this form, it’s really only true up to rearranging columns. This is because the chosen basis will always be represented by an identity matrix (as it is to start with), so to find the basis you can find the embedded identity sub-matrix. In fact, the beginning of the simplex algorithm will have the initial basis sitting in the last few columns of the tableau.
Let’s look a little bit closer at the last row. The first portion is zero because $ A_B^{-1}A_B$ is the identity. But furthermore with this $ A_B^{-1}$ trick the dual LP involves $ A_B^{-1}$ everywhere there’s a variable. In particular, joining all but the last column of the last row of the tableau, we have the vector $ c – A_B^T(A_B^{-1})^T c$, and setting $ y = A_B^{-1}c_B$ we get a candidate solution for the dual. What makes the trick even slicker is that $ A_B^{-1}b$ is already the candidate solution $ x_B$, since $ (A_B^{-1}A)_B^{-1}$ is the identity. So we’re implicitly keeping track of two solutions here, one for the primal LP, given by the last column of the tableau, and one for the dual, contained in the last row of the tableau.
I told you the last row was the dual solution, so why all the other crap there? This is the final slick in the trick: the last row further encodes the complementary slackness conditions. Now that we recognize the dual candidate sitting there, the complementary slackness conditions simply ask for the last row to be non-positive (this is just another way of saying what we said at the beginning of this section!). You should check this, but it gives us a stopping criterion: if the last row is non-positive then stop and output the last column.
The simplex algorithm
Now (finally!) we can describe and implement the simplex algorithm in its full glory. Recall that our informal setup has been:
Find an initial basic feasible solution, and set up the corresponding tableau.
Find a positive index of the last row, and increase the corresponding variable (adding it to the basis) just enough to make another variable from the basis zero (removing it from the basis).
Repeat step 2 until the last row is nonpositive.
Output the last column.
This is almost correct, except for some details about how increasing the corresponding variables works. What we’ll really do is represent the basis variables as pivots (ones in the tableau) and then the first 1 in each row will be the variable whose value is given by the entry in the last column of that row. So, for example, the last entry in the first row may be the optimal value for $ x_5$, if the fifth column is the first entry in row 1 to have a 1.
As we describe the algorithm, we’ll illustrate it running on a simple example. In doing this we’ll see what all the different parts of the tableau correspond to from the previous section in each step of the algorithm.
Spoiler alert: the optimum is $ x_1 = 2, x_2 = 1$ and the value of the max is 8.
So let’s be more programmatically formal about this. The main routine is essentially pseudocode, and the difficulty is in implementing the helper functions
def simplex(c, A, b):
tableau = initialTableau(c, A, b)
while canImprove(tableau):
pivot = findPivotIndex(tableau)
pivotAbout(tableau, pivot)
return primalSolution(tableau), objectiveValue(tableau)
Let’s start with the initial tableau. We’ll assume the user’s inputs already include the slack variables. In particular, our example data before adding slack is
c = [3, 2]
A = [[1, 2], [1, -1]]
b = [4, 1]
And after adding slack:
c = [3, 2, 0, 0]
A = [[1, 2, 1, 0],
[1, -1, 0, 1]]
b = [4, 1]
Now to set up the initial tableau we need an initial feasible solution in mind. The reader is recommended to work this part out with a pencil, since it’s much easier to write down than it is to explain. Since we introduced slack variables, our initial feasible solution (basis) $ B$ can just be $ (0,0,1,1)$. And so $ x_B$ is just the slack variables, $ c_B$ is the zero vector, and $ A_B$ is the 2×2 identity matrix. Now $ A_B^{-1}A_{B’} = A_{B’}$, which is just the original two columns of $ A$ we started with, and $ A_B^{-1}b = b$. For the last row, $ c_B$ is zero so the part under $ A_B^{-1}A_B$ is the zero vector. The part under $ A_B^{-1}A_{B’}$ is just $ c_{B’} = (3,2)$.
Rather than move columns around every time the basis $ B$ changes, we’ll keep the tableau columns in order of $ (x_1, \dots, x_n, \xi_1, \dots, \xi_m)$. In other words, for our example the initial tableau should look like this.
So implementing initialTableau is just a matter of putting the data in the right place.
def initialTableau(c, A, b):
tableau = [row[:] + [x] for row, x in zip(A, b)]
tableau.append(c[:] + [0])
return tableau
As an aside: in the event that we don’t start with the trivial basic feasible solution of “trivially use the slack variables,” we’d have to do a lot more work in this function. Next, the primalSolution() and objectiveValue() functions are simple, because they just extract the encoded information out from the tableau (some helper functions are omitted for brevity).
def primalSolution(tableau):
# the pivot columns denote which variables are used
columns = transpose(tableau)
indices = [j for j, col in enumerate(columns[:-1]) if isPivotCol(col)]
return list(zip(indices, columns[-1]))
def objectiveValue(tableau):
return -(tableau[-1][-1])
Similarly, the canImprove() function just checks if there’s a nonnegative entry in the last row
def canImprove(tableau):
lastRow = tableau[-1]
return any(x > 0 for x in lastRow[:-1])
Let’s run the first loop of our simplex algorithm. The first step is checking to see if anything can be improved (in our example it can). Then we have to find a pivot entry in the tableau. This part includes some edge-case checking, but if the edge cases aren’t a problem then the strategy is simple: find a positive entry corresponding to some entry $ j$ of $ B’$, and then pick an appropriate entry in that column to use as the pivot. Pivoting increases the value of $ x_j$ (from zero) to whatever is the largest we can make it without making some other variables become negative. As we’ve said before, we’ll stop increasing $ x_j$ when some other variable hits zero, and we can compute which will be the first to do so by looking at the current values of $ x_B = A_B^{-1}b$ (in the last column of the tableau), and seeing how pivoting will affect them. If you stare at it for long enough, it becomes clear that the first variable to hit zero will be the entry $ x_i$ of the basis for which $ x_i / A_{i,j}$ is minimal (and $ A_{i,j}$ has to be positve). This is because, in order to maintain the linear equalities, every entry of $ x_B$ will be decreased by that value during a pivot, and we can’t let any of the variables become negative.
All of this results in the following function, where we have left out the degeneracy/unboundedness checks.
[UPDATE 2018-04-21]: The pivot choices are not as simple as I thought at the time I wrote this. See the discussion on this issue, but the short story is that I was increasing the variable too much, and to fix it it’s easier to update the pivot column choice to be the smallest positive entry of the last row. The code on github is updated to reflect that, but this post will remain unchanged.
def findPivotIndex(tableau):
# pick first nonzero index of the last row
column = [i for i,x in enumerate(tableau[-1][:-1]) if x > 0][0]
quotients = [(i, r[-1] / r[column]) for i,r in enumerate(tableau[:-1]) if r[column] > 0]
# pick row index minimizing the quotient
row = min(quotients, key=lambda x: x[1])[0]
return row, column
For our example, the minimizer is the $ (1,0)$ entry (second row, first column). Pivoting is just doing the usual elementary row operations (we covered this in a primer a while back on row-reduction). The pivot function we use here is no different, and in particular mutates the list in place.
def pivotAbout(tableau, pivot):
i,j = pivot
pivotDenom = tableau[i][j]
tableau[i] = [x / pivotDenom for x in tableau[i]]
for k,row in enumerate(tableau):
if k != i:
pivotRowMultiple = [y * tableau[k][j] for y in tableau[i]]
tableau[k] = [x - y for x,y in zip(tableau[k], pivotRowMultiple)]
And in our example pivoting around the chosen entry gives the new tableau.
In particular, $ B$ is now $ (1,0,1,0)$, since our pivot removed the second slack variable $ \xi_2$ from the basis. Currently our solution has $ x_1 = 1, \xi_1 = 3$. Notice how the identity submatrix is still sitting in there, the columns are just swapped around.
There’s still a positive entry in the bottom row, so let’s continue. The next pivot is (0,1), and pivoting around that entry gives the following tableau:
And because all of the entries in the bottom row are negative, we’re done. We read off the solution as we described, so that the first variable is 2 and the second is 1, and the objective value is the opposite of the bottom right entry, 8.
To see all of the source code, including the edge-case-checking we left out of this post, see the Github repository for this post.
Obvious questions and sad answers
An obvious question is: what is the runtime of the simplex algorithm? Is it polynomial in the size of the tableau? Is it even guaranteed to stop at some point? The surprising truth is that nobody knows the answer to all of these questions! Originally (in the 1940’s) the simplex algorithm actually had an exponential runtime in the worst case, though this was not known until 1972. And indeed, to this day while some variations are known to terminate, no variation is known to have polynomial runtime in the worst case. Some of the choices we made in our implementation (for example, picking the first column with a positive entry in the bottom row) have the potential to cycle, i.e., variables leave and enter the basis without changing the objective at all. Doing something like picking a random positive column, or picking the column which will increase the objective value by the largest amount are alternatives. Unfortunately, every single pivot-picking rule is known to give rise to exponential-time simplex algorithms in the worst case (in fact, this was discovered as recently as 2011!). So it remains open whether there is a variant of the simplex method that runs in guaranteed polynomial time.
But then, in a stunning turn of events, Leonid Khachiyan proved in the 70’s that in fact linear programs can always be solved in polynomial time, via a completely different algorithm called the ellipsoid method. Following that was a method called the interior point method, which is significantly more efficient. Both of these algorithms generalize to problems that are harder than linear programming as well, so we will probably cover them in the distant future of this blog.
Despite the celebratory nature of these two results, people still use the simplex algorithm for industrial applications of linear programming. The reason is that it’s much faster in practice, and much simpler to implement and experiment with.
The next obvious question has to do with the poignant observation that whole numbers are great. That is, you often want the solution to your problem to involve integers, and not real numbers. But adding the constraint that the variables in a linear program need to be integer valued (even just 0-1 valued!) is NP-complete. This problem is called integer linear programming, or just integer programming (IP). So we can’t hope to solve IP, and rightly so: the reader can verify easily that boolean satisfiability instances can be written as linear programs where each clause corresponds to a constraint.
This brings up a very interesting theoretical issue: if we take an integer program and just remove the integrality constraints, and solve the resulting linear program, how far away are the two solutions? If they’re close, then we can hope to give a good approximation to the integer program by solving the linear program and somehow turning the resulting solution back into an integer solution. In fact this is a very popular technique called LP-rounding. We’ll also likely cover that on this blog at some point.
Oh there’s so much to do and so little time! Until next time.