Divide-conquer

6 articles

dsa15 min read

Count of Smaller Numbers After Self [Hard] — Merge Sort

Master LeetCode 315 — one of the most common FAANG hard problems. Learn why a naive O(n²) scan fails at scale, how merge sort secretly counts inversions as a side effect, and how to trace through every swap on paper. Includes both brute-force and optimal solutions in Python and JavaScript, a full complexity table, and the three follow-up problems that frequently appear in the next interview round.

Read →
dsa17 min read

Reverse Pairs [Hard] — The Modified Merge Sort That Counts Before It Merges

LeetCode 493 trips up even strong candidates because the count step must happen before the merge step — not during it. Learn exactly why that ordering matters, trace through a full dry run on [1,3,2,3,1], understand the five most common bugs, and walk away with clean Python and JavaScript solutions you can reproduce under pressure.

Read →
dsa6 min read

Construct Quad Tree — LC 427 Divide and Conquer Grid

LC 427 Construct Quad Tree builds a spatial partitioning tree from a 2D binary grid by recursively splitting non-uniform regions into four quadrants. This divide-and-conquer problem is tested at Amazon and Google and models real-world image compression and spatial indexing.

Read →