I came across a question when I solved this LeetCode problem. Although my solution got accepted by the system, I still do not have any idea after searching online for the follow
In Python 2, it's O(n), and it builds a new list. In Python 3, it's O(1), but it doesn't return a list. To draw a random element from a dict's keys
, you'd need to convert it to a list.
It sounds like you were probably using random.choice(d.keys())
for part 3 of that problem. If so, that was O(n), and you got it wrong. You need to either implement your own hash table or maintain a separate list of elements, without sacrificing average-case O(1) insertions and deletions.