Karatsuba

Karatsuba Multiplication Algorithm – Python Code

Anirudh Technical , , , , ,

Motivation for this blog post

I’ve enrolled in Stanford Professor Tim Roughgarden’s Coursera MOOC on the design and analysis of algorithms, and while he covers the theory and intuition behind the algorithms in a surprising amount of detail, we’re left to implement them in a programming language of our choice.

And I’m ging to post Python code for all the algorithms covered during the course!

The Karatsuba Multiplication Algorithm

Karatsuba’s algorithm reduces the multiplication of two n-digit numbers to at most n^{\log_23}\approx n^{1.585} single-digit multiplications in general (and exactly n^{\log_23} when n is a power of 2). Although the familiar grade school algorithm for multiplying numbers is how we work through multiplication in our day-to-day lives, it’s slower (\Theta(n^2)\,\!) in comparison, but only on a computer, of course!

Here’s how the grade school algorithm looks:
(The following slides have been taken from Tim Roughgarden’s notes. They serve as a good illustration. I hope he doesn’t mind my sharing them.)

gradeSchoolAlgorithm

…and this is how Karatsuba Multiplication works on the same problem:

exampleKaratsuba

recursiveKaratsuba

A More General Treatment

Let x and y be represented as n-digit strings in some base B. For any positive integer m less than n, one can write the two given numbers as

x = x_1B^m + x_0
y = y_1B^m + y_0,

where x_0 and y_0 are less than B^m. The product is then

xy = (x_1B^m + x_0)(y_1B^m + y_0)
xy = z_2B^{2m} + z_1B^m + z_0

where

z_2 = x_1y_1
z_1 = x_1y_0 + x_0y_1
z_0 = x_0y_0

These formulae require four multiplications, and were known to Charles Babbage. Karatsuba observed that xy can be computed in only three multiplications, at the cost of a few extra additions. With z_0 and z_2 as before we can calculate

z_1 = (x_1 + x_0)(y_1 + y_0) - z_2 - z_0

which holds since

z_1 = x_1y_0 + x_0y_1
z_1 = (x_1 + x_0)(y_1 + y_0) - x_1y_1 - x_0y_0

A more efficient implementation of Karatsuba multiplication can be set as xy = (b^2 + b)x_1y_1 - b(x_1 - x_0)(y_1 - y_0) + (b + 1)x_0y_0, where b = B^m.

Example

To compute the product of 12345 and 6789, choose B = 10 and m = 3. Then we decompose the input operands using the resulting base (Bm = 1000), as:

12345 = 12 · 1000 + 345
6789 = 6 · 1000 + 789

Only three multiplications, which operate on smaller integers, are used to compute three partial results:

z2 = 12 × 6 = 72
z0 = 345 × 789 = 272205
z1 = (12 + 345) × (6 + 789) − z2 − z0 = 357 × 795 − 72 − 272205 = 283815 − 72 − 272205 = 11538

We get the result by just adding these three partial results, shifted accordingly (and then taking carries into account by decomposing these three inputs in base 1000 like for the input operands):

result = z2 · B2m + z1 · Bm + z0, i.e.
result = 72 · 10002 + 11538 · 1000 + 272205 = 83810205.

Pseudocode and Python code

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