The challenge
Given a non-empty array of numbers, a, a1, a2, … , an-1, where 0 ≤ ai < 231.
Find the maximum result of ai XOR aj, where 0 ≤ i, j < n.
Could you do this in O(n) runtime?
Example:
Input: [3, 10, 5, 25, 2, 8] Output: 28 Explanation: The maximum result is 5 ^ 25 = 28.
The solution in Java
We can very quickly resolve this challenge by performing a double loop and comparing our resultant:
class Solution {
public int findMaximumXOR(int[] nums) {
// store our maximum
int max = 0;
// loop through all numbers
for (int i=0; i<nums.length; i++) {
// loop through all our numbers again
for (int j=0; j<nums.length; j++) {
// keep a temp of the XOR
int tmp = nums[i] ^ nums[j];
// check if it's bigger
if (tmp>max) max = tmp;
}
}
// return our maximum
return max;
}
}
While this solution does come to a correct answer, it is not in the O(n)
of time due to our second loop, and our space complexity could be made better by not using an additional variable.