Minimum operations to exceed threshold value i

You are given a 0-indexed integer array nums, and an integer k.

In one operation, you can remove one occurrence of the smallest element of nums.

Return the minimum number of operations needed so that all elements of the array are greater than or equal to k.

Constraints:

1 <= nums.length <= 50
1 <= nums[i] <= 109
1 <= k <= 109
The input is generated such that there is at least one index i such that nums[i] >= k.

Approach

func minOperations(nums []int, k int) int {
    count := 0
    for i := range nums {
        if nums[i] < k {
            count++
        }
    }
    return count
}

Time Complexity O(N)

Space Complexity O(1)

Intuition

The problem requires us to remove elements from the array until all remaining elements are greater than or equal to k. Since we are only allowed to remove the smallest element in each operation, the minimum number of operations corresponds to the count of elements that are strictly less than k.

Algorithm

Initialize a counter count to track the number of elements that need to be removed.
Iterate through nums:
- If an element is smaller than k, increment count.
Return count as the result.

Complexity Analysis

Time Complexity: O(n) since we iterate through the array once.
Space Complexity: O(1) because we use only a single variable to track the count.

Wrap up

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