Zigzags

Zigzags

We can rethink this as counting the number of equal pairs $(a_i,a_j)=(a_k,a_l)$ where $i<j<k<l$. To do this we loop over $j$ from right to left and make sure we have all $(a_k,a_l)$ pairs where $k>j$ counted in a map. Then we simply iterate over $i$ and add up the number of occurrences of each $(a_i,a_j)$ in the map.

For implementation details, note that we don’t actually want to use a map and make our code slower. We can just use an array of size $n^2$ and convert the pair $(a_i,a_j)$ to the number $a_i\cdot n+a_j$ since the $a_i$ are in the range $[1,n]$. As a bonus, even if the $a_i$ were larger than $n$, we could just compress them down to $[1,n]$ and repeat the solution above.

#include <bits/stdc++.h>

using namespace std;
typedef long long ll;
const int maxn=3e3+10;
int n;
void solve() {
    ll ans = 0;
    scanf("%d", &n);
    vector<int> a(n);
    for (auto &i:a) {
        scanf("%d", &i);
    }
    vector<int> b(n * (n + 1) + 10, 0);
    for (int j = n - 1; j >= 0; j--) {
        int k = j + 1;
        for (int l = k + 1; l < n; l++) {
            b[a[k] * n + a[l]]++;
        }
        for (int i = j - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
            ans += b[a[i] * n + a[j]];
        }
    }
    printf("%lld\n", ans);
}

int main() {
    int _;
    scanf("%d", &_);
    while (_--) {
        solve();
    }
}