# Points-in-a-plane from HackerRank

I've been struggling with this problem for days now, making no progress:

There are N points on an XY plane. In one turn, you can select a set of collinear points on the plane and remove them. Your goal is to remove all the points in the least number of turns. Given the coordinates of the points, calculate two things:

• The minimum number of turns (T) needed to remove all the points.
• The number of ways to to remove them in T turns. Two ways are considered different if any point is removed in a different turn.

I've tried a greedy exhaustive solution, where I draw a line between each pair of points, then start to eliminate the lines in descending order based on the number of points they cross. Unfortunately, there is at least one case where this approach produces suboptimal results:

For ease of discussion, I will call lines "longer" or "shorter", based on how many points they include. The greedy algorithm is simply to eliminate lines in order of descending length.

Suppose we have a set of N longer lines, and another set of M shorter lines. Our greedy algorithm will eliminate the long lines first. But what if every single point of the long lines is also included in a short line? In that case,our initial elimination of the N longer line was a waste, since we would have gotten those lines "for free" had we just eliminated the shorter lines. Specifically, our greedy approach will require N + M eliminations, where we could have cleared all points in just M steps.

The simplest example input demonstrating this is:

(0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 4), (3, 3)
(0, 0), (1, 0), (2, 0), (3, 0)
(0,-1), (1,-2), (2,-4), (3,-3)


As you can see, we have a line of length 4 running along the X axis, and 4 shorter vertial lines of length 3 perpendicular to it. Our greedy algorithm will first eliminate the longest line, after which there will be 8 sets of points remaining, with no more than 2 of them collinear. Eliminating those will thus take 4 steps, for a total 5, where we could have eliminated all points in just 4 steps, had we simply eliminated the 4 vertical lines first.

Could someone provide at least a hint at the general body of knowledge required to approach this? I solved many other HackerRank questions, but can't make any headway with this one.

– vzn
Oct 16, 2013 at 3:18
• Please include the problem statement here, to be self-contained. Also, have you checked whether the HackerRank folks are OK with people posting solutions publicly? Is that acceptable etiquette, or is it less than desirable?
– D.W.
Oct 18, 2013 at 17:54
• @D.W.: I edited the question statement to include the problem. I am not sure how to contact HackerRank about this, but I doubt they would care very much: this is not an ongoing contest, there are no prizes for getting a question right, and if someone is so inclined, a quick google yields coded solutions for most problems. My goal here is actually to receive some guidance, rather than a full solution. Oct 18, 2013 at 20:34