Binary Search/Koko Eating BananasMedium

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Koko Eating Bananas

Binary Search·Medium

Koko loves to eat bananas. There are n piles of bananas, the i-th pile has piles[i] bananas. The guards have gone and will come back in h hours.

Koko can decide her bananas-per-hour eating speed of k. Each hour, she chooses some pile of bananas and eats k bananas from that pile. If the pile has less than k bananas, she eats all of them instead and will not eat any more bananas during that hour.

Return the minimum integer k such that she can eat all the bananas within h hours.

Examples

Input: piles = [3,6,7,11], h = 8

Output: 4

At k=4: piles take ceil(3/4)+ceil(6/4)+ceil(7/4)+ceil(11/4) = 1+2+2+3 = 8 hours. k=3 would need 1+2+3+4 = 10 > 8.

Input: piles = [30,11,23,4,20], h = 5

Output: 30

Input: piles = [30,11,23,4,20], h = 6

Output: 23

Constraints

1 <= piles.length <= 10^4
piles.length <= h <= 10^9
1 <= piles[i] <= 10^9

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Tests

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Passed32 ms

First attempt — retry to track metric movement here.

Your approach

Pattern:Binary Search
Time:O(N)
Space:O(1)

Complete approach — pattern and complexity both named.

Coach

What you got right

You correctly matched the sorted input requirement and implemented a linear-time scan using two pointers.

Where it diverged

No divergence detected. The code correctly aligns with the stated approach.

Next attempt: focus on

Try solving related sliding window problems to build familiarity with two-pointer variants.

Signals

No signals fired — clean run, you stayed in flow.