I was solving the Find the min problem on facebook hackercup using python, my code works fine for sample inputs but for large inputs(10^9) it is taking hours to complete.
So, is it possible that the solution of that problem can't be computed within 6 minutes using python? Or may be my approaches are too bad?
Problem statement:
After sending smileys, John decided to play with arrays. Did you know that hackers enjoy playing with arrays? John has a zero-based index array, m, which contains n non-negative integers. However, only the first k values of the array are known to him, and he wants to figure out the rest.
John knows the following: for each index i, where k <= i < n, m[i] is the minimum non-negative integer which is not contained in the previous *k* values of m.
For example, if k = 3, n = 4 and the known values of m are [2, 3, 0], he can figure out that m[3] = 1.
John is very busy making the world more open and connected, as such, he doesn't have time to figure out the rest of the array. It is your task to help him.
Given the first k values of m, calculate the nth value of this array. (i.e. m[n - 1]).
Because the values of n and k can be very large, we use a pseudo-random number generator to calculate the first k values of m. Given positive integers a, b, c and r, the known values of m can be calculated as follows:
m[0] = a
m[i] = (b * m[i - 1] + c) % r, 0 < i < k