new to recursion, getting StackOverflow. Help!

general
, ,
1

I am writing a divide and conquer recursive function to find minimum element in array. But I am getting java.lang.StackOverflowError . Here is my code. Thanks in advance.

import java.util.Scanner;

public class dynamic {

    public static void main(String arg[])
    {   int i=0;
        Scanner s=new Scanner(System.in);
        int num[]=new int[8];
        while(i<8)
        {
            num[i]=s.nextInt();
            i++;
        }
        
        int b=findmin(num);
        System.out.println(b);
    }

    public static int findmin(int num[])
    {
        if(num.length==0)return 0;

        return findmin(num,0,num.length-1);
    }

    public static int findmin(int num[],int first,int last)
    {   
        if(first==last )return num[first];
        if(first+1==last)return Math.min(num[first],num[last]);

        if(findmin(num,(last/2)+1,last)>findmin(num,first,last/2)) return findmin(num,first,last/2);
        else return findmin(num,(last/2)+1,last);

        
       
    }

}
2

first of all there is no use calculating the minimum by divide and conquer,the algorithm is still O(N).

secondly while dividing [first,last] the division is [first,(first+last)/2] & [(first+last)/2+1,last].

third point is that you are calling the function for same arguements twice, when you are comparing & when you return.

if(findmin(num,(last/2)+1,last)>findmin(num,first,last/2))
return findmin(num,first,last/2);
else return findmin(num,(last/2)+1,last);

take care of the second point and your code will run ,atleast for small inputs

3

I updated your code a little - added logging, please see the output…

1 Like
4

I am using divide and conquer here just for learning purpose, and thanks for ur help. I will check if this works.

1 Like
5

Thanks , but u have modified my function completely so I have to understand it. Please tell me what that printspaces doing ?

6

yeah this worked!!!THANKS

7

It’s just logging recursive function calls printSpaces is doing indentation, to see how the the function was called. I’m using this approach when debugging some difficult problems - it’s easy to do some mistake somewhere and when it is in 5-th level of recursion debugging is like waste of time…

If I have some time, I’ll modify your working solution to show you the output…