All You Need To Know About The Painters Partition Problem

 

Conflicts are faced by every organization, group of people, or even individuals in their daily life. If you think that only you feel the conflict of starting a particular job over others. Then you’ve got it wrong, there are many other people facing the same issue.

Often when you have a lot of tasks to establish in a day, you get confused. This confusion is usually about which task to accomplish first & how much time to devote to a particular task.

Do you know our system also faces a very common conflict? This conflict is named the painter's partition problem. You must have heard the name of this problem while dealing with the flatten linked list situation.

Yes, this name is derived from a real-life problem.

It is based on the fact that a certain board can not be painted by two painters at a time. The issues faced by painters will be with the time taken by the painter to paint N number of boards.

Along with it, the issues might cover topics like space or area on the board, or preference. Similarly in the system, a board of memory units can not be partially covered by two different pieces of data.

Also, do you think that in a series of boards kept beside one another, a painter will paint only the odd or even numbered boards? No, the painters paint the continuous boards kept in a series.

Let’s have a detailed look at this problem and how the painters partition problem is resolved using codes.

What is the painters partition problem?

Painters partition problem is faced by the system when there is n number of boards on the system to be covered.

It can be understood with a simple protocol. The N number of boards are available on the system to be painted by the K number of painters. However, each painter belonging to the K array will take one unit of time at an instant to paint the board completely.

Now, all you need to do is to find out the minimum time taken by the K painters to paint N number of boards.

However, one constraint Or regulation is applied in this case. That is, the painters in K arrays will only paint the contagious boards. Also, at a given instant of time, it can not be done partially by another painter.

There are some constraints or rules that are applied to painters partition problems. They are:

• A single board must be painted by an individual painter. It will not be painted partially by one painter and another member of the painter array.
•  Boards kept beside each other will be painted by the painters only. This means that the painter will not be allowed to paint 3rd board after 1st (skipping 2nd)

Now that you have understood how the constraints work in a painter partition problem, it’s time to discuss the approach to solve this problem.

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