Recommended Time & Space Complexity

You should aim for a solution with O(n) time and O(1) space, where n is the size of the input array.


Hint 1

A brute force approach would be to recursively explore all paths from index 0 to its reachable indices, then process those indices similarly and return the minimum steps to reach the last index. This would be an exponential approach. Can you think of a better way? Maybe a greedy approach works.


Hint 2

We maintain two pointers, l and r, initially set to 0, representing the range of reachable indices. At each step, we iterate through the indices in the range l to r and determine the farthest index that can be reached from the current range.


Hint 3

We then update the pointers l and r to the next range, setting l to r + 1 and r to the farthest index reachable from the current range. We continue this process until the pointers go out of bounds.


Hint 4

The number of steps taken represents the minimum steps required to reach the last index, as it is guaranteed that we can reach it.