Re^2: Removing redundant powersets with minimal RAM

[jimt]

Re-read my post - the whole point is not to store the powerset anywhere. A set with only 100 elements in my scheme needs to be stored only once. That's 13 bytes in a bit vector. The powerset is implied by checking against subsets of it using bitwise & operations.

The problem is when there are multiple sets, there are multiple checks. 500 sets of 100 elements each only require 6.5k to store in memory, but require up to 500 checks to determine if the set I'm currently working with is a subset of any of them. It's that searching through those sets I want to speed up.

[Anonymous Monk]

To succinctly state the original problem, given a set of sets, generate the powerset for all sets but remove all duplicates.

I guess I'm confused by your stated purpose.

If you actually generate the power set of just one set with 100 elements (let alone try to consider how it iteracts with any other set!), you'll output a power set consisting of 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 elements.

Where are you going to put this power set once you generate it? It's not like you can store it on your hard drive. It won't fit on any storage device I can concieve of. You certainly can't read it off the screen. I'm confused. :-(