I came across this question on an interview questions thread. Here is the question:

Given two integer arrays A [1..n] and B[1..m], find the smallest window in A that contains all elements of B. In other words, find a pair < i , j > such that A[i..j] contains B[1..m].

If A doesn't contain all the elements of B, then i,j can be returned as -1. The integers in A need not be in the same order as they are in B. If there are more than one smallest window (different, but have the same size), then its enough to return one of them.

Example: A[1,2,5,11,2,6,8,24,101,17,8] and B[5,2,11,8,17]. The algorithm should return i = 2 (index of 5 in A) and j = 9 (index of 17 in A).

Now I can think of two variations.

Let's suppose that B has duplicates.

1. This variation doesn't consider the number of times each element occurs in B. It just checks for all the unique elements that occur in B and finds the smallest corresponding window in A that satisfies the above problem. For example, if A[1,2,4,5,7] and B[2,2,5], this variation doesn't bother about there being two 2's in B and just checks A for the unique integers in B namely 2 and 5 and hence returns i=1, j=3.

2. This variation accounts for duplicates in B. If there are two 2's in B, then it expects to see at least two 2's in A as well. If not, it returns -1,-1.

When you answer, please do let me know which variation you are answering. Pseudocode should do. Please mention space and time complexity if it is tricky to calculate it. Mention if your solution assumes array indices to start at 1 or 0 too.

Thanks in advance.