Stack solving program in C

Given a set of ints, efficiently sorts the data using two stacks and a limited number of operations.

• The game is composed of 2 stacks named a and b.
• To start with:
• a contains a random number of either positive or negative numbers without any duplicates.
• b is empty
• The goal is to sort in ascending order numbers into stack a.
• To do this you have the following operations at your disposal:
  • sa : swap a - swap the first 2 elements at the top of stack a. Do nothing if there is only one or no elements).
  • sb : swap b - swap the first 2 elements at the top of stack b. Do nothing if there is only one or no elements).
  • ss : sa and sb at the same time.
  • pa : push a - take the first element at the top of b and put it at the top of a. Do nothing if b is empty.
  • pb : push b - take the first element at the top of a and put it at the top of b. Do nothing if a is empty.
  • ra : rotate a - shift up all elements of stack a by 1. The first element becomes the last one.
  • rb : rotate b - shift up all elements of stack b by 1. The first element becomes the last one.
  • rr : ra and rb at the same time.
  • rra : reverse rotate a - shift down all elements of stack a by 1. The last element becomes the first one.

My program uses three different sorts:

• An insertion sort for data sets with more than 10 elements.
• A bubble sort for data sets between 3 and 10.
• A simple sort which only uses SA, RA and RRA.

Example usage:

git clone https://github.com/tpan/stack_solver.git
make

$ ./push_swap 42 10 20 6 3
sa rra pb rra pb pb ra pa pa pa

For 100 random ints, less than 700 operations should be required. For 500 random ints, fewer than 5300 operations.

I also included a verbose '-v' flag which serves as a visualizer for the stacks. ./push_Swap 42 10 20 6 3 -v

• Of course, it must conform to the 42 Norm style guide

Authorized functions

• write
• malloc
• free
• exit