Welcome to this unit's coding session! We're going to take a deep dive into an exciting technique—the two-pointer technique. This technique is a crucial skill for enhancing your algorithmic problem-solving abilities, especially when dealing with arrays. In this unit, we'll apply this technique to a problem that involves an array of integers and a target value. Let's get started!
Envision the problem at hand: we've been given an array of distinct integers and a target value. The task is to find all pairs of integers from the given array that sum up to the target value using the two-pointer technique. The function find_pairs
should take this array of integers and a target value as parameters. It should return a list containing pairs of numbers, sorted in order from the smallest to the biggest for the first element of each pair. If no pairs satisfy this requirement, the function should return an empty list.
Consider, for instance, an example in which you're given an array, numbers = [1, 3, 5, 2, 8, -2]
, and target = 6
. In this case, the function should return [[-2,8], [1,5]]
because only these pairs from the input array of integers add up to the target value.
The naive approach to solve this problem would be to use a pair of nested loops to check each pair of numbers.
This would have a time complexity of and a space complexity of . The naive approach can be time-consuming and inefficient, particularly for large arrays.
