Skip to main content

Binary Search - Easy Level - Question 1

Binary Search - Easy Level - Question 1


Leetcode 278 First Bad Version

You are a product manager and currently leading a team to develop a new product. Unfortunately, the latest version of your product fails the quality check. Since each version is developed based on the previous version, all the versions after a bad version are also bad.

Suppose you have n versions [1, 2, ..., n] and you want to find out the first bad one, which causes all the following ones to be bad.

You are given an API bool isBadVersion(version) which returns whether version is bad. Implement a function to find the first bad version. You should minimize the number of calls to the API.

Constraints:

1 <= bad <= n <= 2^31 - 1


Analysis:

The n value could be very large, so the naïve way to go back one by one is too slow.

One observation is that: if the xth version is good, then all the previous versions before x are good as well. So it is suitable for the binary search.

So we can make a guess first, then can shrink the search range by half.


See the code below:

// The API isBadVersion is defined for you.
// bool isBadVersion(int version);

class Solution {
public:
    int firstBadVersion(int n) {
        int left = 1, right = n;
        while(left < right) {
            int mid = left + (right - left) / 2;
            if(isBadVersion(mid)) right = mid;
            else left = mid + 1;
        }
        return left;
    }
};




Example


Easy Level

Medium Level

Hard Level

Interview Questions


Upper Layer

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Segment Tree

Segment tree can be viewed as an abstract data structure which using some more space to trade for speed. For example, for a typical question with O(N^2) time complexity, the segment tree method can decrease it to O(N*log(N)).  To make it understandable, let us consider one example. Say we have an integer array of N size, and what we want is to query the maximum with a query range [idx1, idx2], where idx1 is the left indexes, and idx2 is the right indexes inclusive. If we only do this kind of query once, then we just need to scan through the array from idx1 to idx2 once, and record the maximum, done. The time complexity is O(N), which is decent enough in most cases even though it is not the optimal one (for example, with a segment tree built, the time complexity can decrease down to O(log(N))). However, how about we need to query the array N times? If we continue to use the naïve way above, then the time complexity is O(N^2), since for each query we need to scan the query range once...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bit Manipulation - Example

  Leetcode 136 Single Number Given a non-empty array of integers nums, every element appears twice except for one. Find that single one. You must implement a solution with a linear runtime complexity and use only constant extra space. Constraints: 1 <= nums.length <= 3 * 10^4 -3 * 10^4 <= nums[i] <= 3 * 10^4 Each element in the array appears twice except for one element which appears only once. Analysis: If there is no space limitation, this question can be solved by counting easily. But counting requires additional space. Here we can use xor (^) operation based on some interesting observations:  A^A = 0, here A is any number A^0 = A, here A is any number Since all the number appears twice except one, then all the number appear even numbers will be cancelled out, and only the number appears one time is left, which is what we want. See the code below: class Solution { public: int singleNumber(vector<int>& nums) { int res = 0; for(auto ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rolling Hash

Rolling hash is one common trick used to increase efficiency of substring comparisons by compressing (or hashing) a string into a integer. After this step, we can compare two strings directly without comparing each chars. So the efficiency can be increased from O(N) to O(1). So how to implement the rolling hash? First we need to choose a base for the expansion and a modulo to mod. The basic formula is (suppose the window is n, and the rolling direction is from left to right), HashVal = (A1*p^(n-1) + A2*p^(n-2) + ... + An-1*p^1 + An*p^0)%mod where HashVal is the hash value, Ai is the ith element, p is the base, and mod is the modulo. To avoid collision as much as we can, p and modulo usually need to be large prime numbers. One corner case is that the base order in the above formula cannot be reversed. Or to be more clear, if the rolling direction is from left to right in an array, the first element should be in the highest order of the base, or times p^(n-1), and the last element times ...
Post a Comment
Read more