Once again I found a topic that is useful, interesting but has very less resources online. Before writing this I did a small survey and surprised that almost none of the Indian programmers knew this algorithm. Its important to learn this, all the red programmers on codeforces use this effectively in div 1 C and D problems. There were not any problems on this an year and half back, but from then there is a spike up! We can expect more problems on this in future contests.
1) State a problem
2) Explain a simple solution which takes O(N^2)
3) Slight modification to above algorithm. It still runs in O(N^2)
4) Explain an algorithm to solve above problem and state its correctness
5) Proof for complexity of above algorithm – O(Sqrt(N) * N)
6) Explain where and when we can use above algorithm
7) Problems for practice and sample code
State a problem
Given an array of size N. All elements of array <= N. You need to answer M queries. Each query is of the form L, R. You need to answer the count of values in range [L, R] which are repeated at least 3 times.
Example: Let the array be {1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1} (zero indexed)
Query: L = 0, R = 4. Answer = 1. Values in the range [L, R] = {1, 2, 3, 1, 1} only 1 is repeated at least 3 times.
Query: L = 1, R = 8. Answer = 2. Values in the range [L, R] = {2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3} 1 is repeated 3 times and 2 is repeated 3 times. Number of elements repeated at least 3 times = Answer = 2.
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