Follow up for "Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array":
What if duplicates are allowed?Would this affect the run-time complexity? How and why?
Suppose a sorted array is rotated at some pivot unknown to you beforehand.
(i.e., 0 1 2 4 5 6 7
might become 4 5 6 7 0 1 2
).
Find the minimum element.
The array may contain duplicates.
Solution:
The difference between this question and the previous question is that the rule that works in the previous question does not work here:
if nums[i] > nums[j] then nums[i...j] wouldn't contain the pivot and thus can be dropped.
One example is [4,1,2,3,4], i = 0, j = 4.
If we apply the rule above, then nums[0....4] is determined as having no pivot.
But that is not true. Thus when we have num[left boundary] == num[right boundary], we cannot give up this range.
Instead we shrink the left boundary or right boundary by skipping the duplicates.
This step would introduce O(n) into our algorithm.
Code:
class Solution {
public:
int findMin(vector<int>& nums) {
int h = nums.size() - 1;
int l = 0;
int minn = INT_MAX;
while(h>=l){
int mid = (h+l)/2;
minn = min(nums[mid], minn);
if(nums[mid] <= nums[h]){
if(nums[mid] == nums[h]){
while(h >= mid && nums[h] == nums[mid]){//skip duplicates
h--;
}
}else{
minn = min(nums[mid], minn);
h = mid - 1;
}
}else{
if(nums[mid] > nums[l]){
minn = min(nums[l], minn);
l = mid + 1;
}else{
while(l <= mid && nums[l] == nums[mid]){
l++;
}
}
}
}
return minn;
}
};