How can I find a number which occurs an odd number of times in a SORTED array in O(n) time?

Question

I have a question and I tried to think over it again and again... but got nothing so posting the question here. Maybe I could get some view-point of others, to try and make it w

Answer 1

Assume indexing start at 0. Binary search for the smallest even i such that x[i] != x[i+1]; your answer is x[i].

edit: due to public demand, here is the code

int f(int *x, int min, int max) {
  int size = max;
  min /= 2;
  max /= 2;
  while (min < max) {
    int i = (min + max)/2;
    if (i==0 || x[2*i-1] == x[2*i])
      min = i+1;
    else
      max = i-1;
  }
  if (2*max == size || x[2*max] != x[2*max+1])
    return x[2*max];
  return x[2*min];
}