LintCode-447. Search in a Big Sorted Array

447 · Search in a Big Sorted Array
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Medium
Accepted Rate
38%
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Description
Given a big sorted array with non-negative integers sorted by non-decreasing order. The array is so big so that you can not get the length of the whole array directly, and you can only access the kth number by ArrayReader.get(k) (or ArrayReader->get(k) for C++).

Find the first index of a target number. Your algorithm should be in O(log k), where k is the first index of the target number.

Return -1, if the number doesn’t exist in the array.

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If you accessed an inaccessible index (outside of the array), ArrayReader.get will return 2,147,483,647.

Example
Example 1:

Input: [1, 3, 6, 9, 21, …], target = 3
Output: 1
Example 2:

Input: [1, 3, 6, 9, 21, …], target = 4
Output: -1
Challenge
O(logn) time, n is the first index of the given target number.

Tags
Related Problems

14
First Position of Target
Easy

解法：

先每次试探着把pos增倍(类似TCP的slow start算法)，然后再binary search。注意题目要求第一次出现的位置，所以当array[mid]==target时，设end=mid; 而不是直接返回mid。

    int searchBigSortedArray(ArrayReader * reader, int target) {
        int pos=0;
        if (reader->get(0)==target) return 0;
        pos=1;
        
        while(reader->get(pos)<target) {
            pos=pos<<1;
        }
        
        int start=0, end=pos;
        while(start+1<end) {
            int mid=start+(end-start)/2;
            if (reader->get(mid)==target) end=mid;
            else if (reader->get(mid)<target) start=mid;
            else end=mid;
        }
        
        if (reader->get(start)==target) return start;
        if (reader->get(end)==target) return end;
        return -1;
    }