Meaning of "two comparisons" in the context of the provided question from geeksforgeeks.com

Question

This is the exact question from the website.

Given a sorted array having 10 elements which contains 6 different numbers in which only 1 number is repeated five times. Your task is to find the duplicate number using two comparisons only.

I am not sure what "two comparisons" means here. Could you please shed some light on it. Thank you.

 

This is my code that I wrote as a solution to this question:

 

int FindDuplicate(vector<int>& nums)
{

int count = 1, marked = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < nums.size(); i++)
{

if (nums[i + 1] == nums[marked])
{
count++;

if (count == 5)
return nums[marked];
}

else
{
marked = i + 1;
count = 1;
}
}

return 0;
}

Answer 1

Hello Nishant,

 

What they mean when they are saying "using only two comparisons", they are asking you to only use two types of comparisons to complete this. These comparisons are the numerical comparisons you are used to from mathematics the ==, <, >, and !=