CA 07 - Kth Smallest

Problem Statement: click here Problem Understanding: We are given an integer array arr[] and an integer k. The task is to return the kth smallest element in the array when arr[] is sorted. Initial Approach: My initial approach was to use the sort() function in Python so sort the array. Then by indexing arr[k-1] we can get the kth smallest element. Example: arr= [10, 5, 4, 3, 48, 6, 2, 33, 53, 10] k = 4 arr.sort() print(arr[k-1]) Sorted array: arr= [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 10, 33, 48, 53] Output: 5 Brute force approach: Without using the in-built sort() function, we can achieve the same solution by: arr = [7, 10, 4, 3, 20, 15] k = 3 for i in range(k): # for looping until smallest element k-1 min_val = arr[0] # assume first element is smallest min_index = 0 # since we assumed the first element for j in range(len(arr)): if arr[j] < min_val: min_val = arr[j] min_index = j arr.pop(min_index) # remove the smallest element print(min_val) In this approach, we first loop until range(k) because we