First Repeating Element

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Unit 2 Session 2 (Click for link to problem statements)

U-nderstand

Understand what the interviewer is asking for by using test cases and questions about the problem.

• What if the list is empty?
  • In this case, return None.

P-lan

Plan the solution with appropriate visualizations and pseudocode.

General Idea: Loop through the list, keeping track of what index we FIRST saw an element at. When we see an element twice, keep track of the lowest index so far.

1) Create an empty dict to store first occurrence of indices
2) Initialize min_index to None
3) For each index in nums:
  a) If we haven't seen this num before, store its index in the dict
  b) If it's already in the dict, it's a duplicate!
     i) If it's first-seen index is smaller than our min_index, update min_index
4) Return min_index

⚠️ Common Mistakes

• Make sure you are returning the FIRST index the repeating element appears at -- not the index where you found the second element.

I-mplement

def find_min_index_of_repeating(nums):
    # Dictionary to store the first occurrence index of elements
    first_occurrence = {}
    min_index = None  # Initialize min_index to impossible value
    
    for i in range(len(nums)):
        if nums[i] not in first_occurrence:
            first_occurrence[nums[i]] = i
        elif min_index is None or first_occurrence[nums[i]] < min_index:
            min_index = first_occurrence[nums[i]]
            
    return min_index

Alternate right-to-left solution:

def find_min_index_of_repeating(nums):
    # Dictionary to store the first occurrence index of elements
    first_occurrence = {}
    min_index = None  # Initialize min_index to infinity
    
    # Traverse the list from right to left to ensure the minimum index of the first repeating element is found
    for i in range(len(nums)-1, -1, -1):
        if nums[i] in first_occurrence:
            # If the element is found in the dictionary, update min_index if necessary
            min_index = i
        else:
            # Store the index of the first occurrence
            first_occurrence[nums[i]] = i
    
    return min_index