Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions

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Solution: Problem Challenge 1: Search Bitonic Array

Problem Statement

Given a Bitonic array, find if a given ‘key’ is present in it. An array is considered bitonic if it is monotonically increasing and then monotonically decreasing. Monotonically increasing or decreasing means that for any index i in the array arr[i] != arr[i+1].

Write a function to return the index of the ‘key’. If the 'key' appears more than once, return the smaller index. If the ‘key’ is not present, return -1.

Example 1:

Input: [1, 3, 8, 4, 3], key=4
Output: 3

Example 2:

Input: [3, 8, 3, 1], key=8
Output: 1

Example 3:

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