easyDSA

How do you find the majority element?

Q: How do you find the majority element?

**Intuition.** The majority element appears more than n/2 times — more than everything else combined. **Boyer-Moore voting** exploits that: keep a candidate and a counter; matching votes increment it, others decrement it. When the counter hits 0, adopt the next element as the new candidate. The true majority always survives. [2,2,1,1,1,2,2]: count cancels minorities, 2 wins 2 2 1 <text x="230"

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Explain Boyer-Moore voting.

arraysboyer-moore

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Boyer-Moore voting

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def majority_element(nums):
    candidate, count = None, 0
    for x in nums:
        if count == 0:
            candidate = x
        count += 1 if x == candidate else -1
    return candidate


# --- demo ---
print(majority_element([2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2]))   # 2

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