finding the minimum element in a cyclic sorted array [duplicate]

Question

I have tried the following code to find out the minimum element in a cyclic sorted array. But it fails when the low = 1 and high =2 because the mid is always 1 and a[mid]=a[1] is always greater than the a[high].

I am trying to use Binary Search here to find the solution.

//finding the minim element in the cyclic sorted array
int arrC[]={10,13,1,3,4,5,8};
int low=0,high =6;
int mid=0,reset =1;
while (low < high)
{
    mid = (low+ high)/2;
    if (arrC[mid]>arrC[high])
    {
        low = mid;
    }
    else if (arrC[mid] < arrC[high])
    {
        high = mid;

    }
}
printf("minimum element is %d",arrC[mid+1]); 

Answer 1

There are 2 problems with your code

• As pointed by Paulpro...treat arrC[high] as infinity..
• Apart from that I would also suggest you to use

mid = low + (high-low)/2;

Don't use (low+high)/2 . This can cause the sum to exceed the limit of integer and will result in a negative value. One more reason your code can fail.