Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Python

Solution: Find K Pairs with Smallest Sums

Explore how to identify the k pairs with the smallest sums from two sorted integer arrays. Learn to implement an optimized k-way merge algorithm using a min heap, which improves efficiency over the naive method. Understand the approach's time and space complexities, and apply this technique to solve related coding interview problems effectively.

We'll cover the following...

Statement

You are given two integer arrays, list1 and list2, sorted in non-decreasing order, and an integer, k.

A pair (u, v)(u, \space v) is defined as one element uu chosen from list1 and one element vv chosen from list2.

Your task is to return the k pairs (u1, v1),(u2, v2),...,(uk, vk)(u1, \space v1), (u2, \space v2), ..., (uk, \space vk) whose sums u1+v1,u2+v2,...,uk+vku1 + v1, u2 + v2, ..., uk + vk ...