tj_thompson has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Hello monks. I have a fairly simple algorithmic question. It seems to me there should be a good way to do this, but I haven't come up with anything yet and figured I'd toss it to you folks.
Assume I have an array with some arbitrary number of values in it all initialized to zero.
@a = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0);After initialization, the values in this array are only incremented (never decremented). I never add or remove elements to or from the array.
# some time down the road after some number of increments @a = (3, 1, 8, 12, 2);
However, I am not really interested in the actual value of each element, but in the minimum value of the set of elements at any one time. Once a minimum floor value is reached, I'm ready to move on.
The array I'm dealing with will be very large with many increment operations. Is there a way to track the minimum value currently in the array without having to resort to a linear search through it after each increment?