Thursday, 22 October 2015

Find duplicates in O(n) time and O(1) extra space

Given an array of n elements which contains elements from 0 to n-1, with any of these numbers appearing any number of times. Find these repeating numbers in O(n) and using only constant memory space.
For example, let n be 7 and array be {1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 6, 6}, the answer should be 1, 3 and 6.
This problem is an extended version of following problem.
Method 1 and Method 2 of the above link are not applicable as the question says O(n) time complexity and O(1) constant space. Also, Method 3 and Method 4 cannot be applied here because there can be more than 2 repeating elements in this problem. Method 5 can be extended to work for this problem. Below is the solution that is similar to the Method 5.
Algorithm:
traverse the list for i= 0 to n-1 elements
{
  check for sign of A[abs(A[i])] ;
  if positive then
     make it negative by   A[abs(A[i])]=-A[abs(A[i])];
  else  // i.e., A[abs(A[i])] is negative
     this   element (ith element of list) is a repetition
}
Implementation:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
 
void printRepeating(int arr[], int size)
{
  int i;
  printf("The repeating elements are: \n");
  for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
  {
    if (arr[abs(arr[i])] >= 0)
      arr[abs(arr[i])] = -arr[abs(arr[i])];
    else
      printf(" %d ", abs(arr[i]));
  }
}
 
int main()
{
  int arr[] = {1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 6, 6};
  int arr_size = sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]);
  printRepeating(arr, arr_size);
  getchar();
  return 0;
}
Note: The above program doesn’t handle 0 case (If 0 is present in array). The program can be easily modified to handle that also. It is not handled to keep the code simple.
Output:
The repeating elements are:
1 3 6
Time Complexity: O(n)
Auxiliary Space: O(1)
Please write comments if you find the above codes/algorithms incorrect, or find better ways to solve the same problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment