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154. Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array II

Difficulty Topics

Description

Suppose an array of length n sorted in ascending order is rotated between 1 and n times. For example, the array nums = [0,1,4,4,5,6,7] might become:

  • [4,5,6,7,0,1,4] if it was rotated 4 times.
  • [0,1,4,4,5,6,7] if it was rotated 7 times.

Notice that rotating an array [a[0], a[1], a[2], ..., a[n-1]] 1 time results in the array [a[n-1], a[0], a[1], a[2], ..., a[n-2]].

Given the sorted rotated array nums that may contain duplicates, return the minimum element of this array.

You must decrease the overall operation steps as much as possible.

 

Example 1:

Input: nums = [1,3,5]
Output: 1

Example 2:

Input: nums = [2,2,2,0,1]
Output: 0

 

Constraints:

  • n == nums.length
  • 1 <= n <= 5000
  • -5000 <= nums[i] <= 5000
  • nums is sorted and rotated between 1 and n times.

 

Follow up: This problem is similar to Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array, but nums may contain duplicates. Would this affect the runtime complexity? How and why?

 

Solution

find-minimum-in-rotated-sorted-array-ii.py
class Solution:
    def findMin(self, nums: List[int]) -> int:
        left, right = 0, len(nums) - 1

        while left <= right:
            mid = left + (right - left) // 2

            if nums[mid] > nums[right]:
                left = mid + 1
            elif nums[mid] < nums[right]:
                right = mid
            else:
                right -= 1

        return nums[left]