Comparing Alphabetic Products Using Modular Arithmetic
When processing identification strings composed of uppercase letters, a common pattern involves converting characters to numerical values and aggregating them through multiplication. Consider a scenario where two entities—a celestial object and a team—must be matched based on their respective name encodings.
Each character maps to its 1-indexed position in the alphabet (A→1, B→2, ..., Z→26). For a given string, compute the cumulative product of these mappnigs. The matching criterion requires comparing the remainders when dividing these products by 47. If congruent, the system indicates readiness; otherwise, it signals a wait state.
Input Specification Two whitespace-separated strings, each containing 1 to 6 uppercase English letters. The first represents the comet identifier; the second represents the team identifier.
Algorithmic Approach
- Initialize accumulators for both identifiers to multiplicative identity (1).
- For each character in the first string, convert to its ordinal value and multiply into the first accumulator.
- Repeat for the second string, populating the second accumulator.
- Reduce both values modulo 47 and compare equality.
- Output "GO" for matching remainders, "STAY" otherwise.
Implementation Considerations Since 26^6 exceeds 32-bit integer capacity (308,915,776), 64-bit integers prevent overflow during intermediate calculations. Alternatively, apply the modulo operation during each multiplication step to maintain numerical bounds throughout computation.
#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int computeSignature(const string& identifier) {
const int MODULUS = 47;
long long accumulator = 1;
for (char symbol : identifier) {
int value = symbol - 'A' + 1;
accumulator = (accumulator * value) % MODULUS;
}
return static_cast<int>(accumulator);
}
int main() {
string celestialBody, squad;
cin >> celestialBody >> squad;
int cometHash = computeSignature(celestialBody);
int teamHash = computeSignature(squad);
cout << (cometHash == teamHash ? "GO" : "STAY") << endl;
return 0;
}