Welcome to our focused exploration of Ruby's Set
and its remarkable applications in solving algorithmic challenges. In this lesson, "Mastering Unique Elements and Anagram Detection with Ruby Set", we'll delve into how this efficient data structure can be leveraged to address and solve various problems commonly encountered in technical interviews.
Picture this: you're given a vast list of words, and you must identify the final word that stands proudly solitary — the last word that is not repeated. Imagine sorting through a database of unique identifiers and finding one identifier towards the end of the list that is unlike any other.
The straightforward approach would be to examine each word in reverse, comparing it to every other word for uniqueness. This brute-force method would result in poor time complexity, O(n^2)
, which is less than ideal for large datasets.
Here is the naive approach in Ruby:
We can utilize two Set
instances: words_set
to maintain unique words and duplicates_set
to keep track of duplicate words. By the end, we can remove all duplicated words from to achieve our goal.
