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Solution: Minimize Max Distance to Gas Station

Explore how to apply modified binary search to minimize the maximum distance between gas stations by strategically adding new stations. Learn to balance gaps and understand precision-based stopping criteria for continuous search ranges to solve this optimization problem efficiently.

Statement

You are given an integer array, stations, representing the positions of existing gas stations along the x-axis. You are also given an integer k, indicating the number of additional gas stations you must add. These new gas stations can be placed at any position along the x-axis, including non-integer locations.

A penalty is the maximum distance between two adjacent gas stations after placing the k new stations. Your task is to return the smallest possible value of this penalty. An answer is correct if it is within 10610^{-6} of the actual answer.

Constraints:

  • 1010 \leq stations.length 2000\leq 2000

  • 00 \leq stations[i] 108\leq 10^8

  • The stations array is sorted in a strictly increasing order.

  • 11 \leq k 106\leq 10^{6} ...