Data Structures19 sections · 729 units
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A Harder Problem

Sequence detection

Given an unsorted array of integers, find the length of the longest consecutive elements sequence.

Example: [100,4,200,1,3,2][100, 4, 200, 1, 3, 2] Output: 44 (the sequence is [1,2,3,4][1, 2, 3, 4]) The constraint: you must solve this in O(n)O(n) time. Sorting would be O(nlog⁡n)O(n \log n).

The trick here is subtle. Hash sets give O(1)O(1) lookup, but how do you efficiently find consecutive sequences?