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LeetCode 162, Medium. Topics: Array, Binary Search. View on LeetCode. Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 16 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:

Problem

A peak element is an element that is strictly greater than its neighbors. Given a 0-indexed integer array nums, find a peak element, and return its index. If the array contains multiple peaks, return the index to any of the peaks. You may imagine that nums[-1] = nums[n] = -∞. In other words, an element is always considered to be strictly greater than a neighbor that is outside the array. You must write an algorithm that runs in O(log n) time.

Examples

Constraints

  • 1 <= nums.length <= 1000
  • -2<sup>31</sup> <= nums[i] <= 2<sup>31</sup> - 1
  • nums[i] != nums[i + 1] for all valid i.

Solution

Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:

Complexity

Tags

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Last modified on September 7, 2026