Hello, hello! As I continue my job search, I am practicing my algorithm questions on Leetcode. So, I thought I would blog about some Leetcode problems as I solve them.

As a Bootcamp graduate, I did not get much practice in algorithms, so it has been a very fun and sometimes frustrating trial and error in recognizing patterns, optimizing my code to be faster (looking at you Big-O), learning how to break down a problem, and sometimes implementing neat math tricks to solve these algorithm problems. I have been practicing them using JavaScript.

As I’m relatively new to algorithm problems, I’ve started out with their Easy Collection of Top Interview Questions. So in Contains Duplicate:

Given an integer array nums, return true if any value appears at least twice in the array, and return false if every element is distinct.

Examples:

Input: nums = [1,2,3,1]
Output: true

Input: nums = [1,2,3,4]
Output: false
Input: nums = [1,1,1,3,3,4,3,2,4,2]
Output: true

Simply, if any numbers in the array appear more than once in the array, I need to return true . Now, I will definitely need to figure out a way to compare a number to the other numbers. Additionally, I will most likely need to loop through the array so I have access to each number to then compare it to others.

First, I thought that I could iterate through the array, and at each instance, I iterate through another loop of the remaining integers and compare them to see if any are equal (===). However, per my beginner understanding of Big-O, this would yield me an unfavorable time complexity of O(n²).

Then, I thought that I could create an object and count how many times a number in the array appears. By doing this, I could then check to see if any of the numbers had a count greater than 1. If so, then I could return true else I would return false .

#computer-science #leetcode #javascript #programming #algorithms #leetcodes algorithm