PRASAD V.
POTLURI SIDDHARTHA
INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
PROBLEM SOLVING
TECHNIQUES
By
B. Vinay Kumar
Assistant Professor
Dept. of CSE
PVPSIT, Kanuru.
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
FINDING THE SQUARE ROOT OF A NUMBER
• Problem:
• Given a number m devise an algorithm to compute its square root.
• Algorithm development
• We initially confronted with the problem of designing an algorithm to
compute square roots, we may be at a loss as to just where to start.
• In these circumstances we need to be really sure of what is meant by “the
square root of a number”.
• Taking some specific examples, we know that the square root of 4 is 2, the
square root of 9 is 3, and the square root of 16 is 4 and so on.
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
From these examples we can conclude that in the general case the square root
on n, of another number m must satisfy the equation
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• Suppose, for example, we do not know the square root of 36.
• We might guess that 9 could be its square root.
• Using equation (1) to check our guess we find that 9x9 = 81 which is greater than 36.
• Our guess of 9 is too high so we might next try 8.
• For example, 8x8 = 64 which is still greater than 36 but closer than our original guess.
• The investigation we have made suggests that we could adopt the following systematic
approach to solve the problem.
1. Choose a number n less than the number m we want the square root of.
2. square n and if it is greater than m decrease n by 1 and repeat step 2, else go to step 3.
3. When the square of our guess at the square root is less than m we can start increasing n
by 0.1 until we again compute a guess greater than m. At this point, we start decreasing
our guess by 0.01 and so on until we have computed the square root we require to the
desired accuracy.
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• Studying our algorithm carefully, we observe that he number of iterations it
requires depends critically on how good our initial guess is (e.g. if m is
10,000 and our initial guess n is 500 we will need over 400 iterations
before we start to converge rapidly on the square root).
• This observation raises the question, can we derive a quicker way of
homing in on the square root that is not so critically dependent on our
initial guess?
• To try to make progress towards a better algorithm, let us again return to
the problem of finding the square root of 36.
• In choosing 9 as our initial guess, we found that
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• We know from equation (1) that the 9 should divide into 36 to give a
quotient of 9 if it is truly the square root.
• Instead 9 divides into 36 to give 4. Had we initially chosen 4 as our
square root candidate, we would have found
• From this we can see that we choose a square root candidate that is too
large, we can readily derive from it another candidate that is too small.
• The larger the guess is that is too large, the correspondingly smaller will
be the guess that is too small.
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• In other words, the 9 and the 4 tend to cancel out each other by deviating
from the square m in opposite directions. Thus
• The square root of 36 must lie somewhere between 9, which is too big,
and 4, which is too small.
• Taking the average of 9 and 4:
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• We see that it again has a complementary value (i.e. 5.33) that is less
than 36.
• Thus,
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• We now have two estimates of the square root, one on either side, that
are closer than our first two estimates.
• We can proceed to get an even better estimate of the square root by
averaging these two most recent guesses:
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• Our first task now is to clarify the averaging rule that we intend to use to
generate successively better approximation to the desired square root.
• As our initial guess g1 we chose 9.
• We then proceeded to average this guess with its complementary value (36/9
= 4).
• Our next step was to get an improved estimate of the square root, g2, by
averaging g1 and its complementary value (i.e. (9+36/9)/2 = 6.5).
• We can therefore write the expression for g2 in the general case as
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
• In our example for finding the square root of 36, we began with g1 = 9
and established that g2 = 6.5.
• We then repeated the averaging process.
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
PVPSIT (Autonomous)
Problem Solving Techniques B. Vinay Kumar Monday, June 9, 2025
