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Before people start bashing me, I just wanted to say that the problem is highly rated(2400), so would be too much for me to solve.↵
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However, after spending a day on it :p , I figured out that I can binary search on the answer by taking a prospective number as the maximum and check if we can form a path using <=k nodes as the path, while the Mac distance from this path would be <= prospective answer.
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My approach for solving this problem was to use — ↵
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- **Binary Search** — For each prospective max possible distance `max_`, we check how many nodes we require in our path such that the max distance from this path to other non-selected nodes is <= `max_`. If the number of selected nodes for the path is <= `k` in the problem, we mark our prospective answer as a possible and return the **min** out of all possible answers.↵
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The idea seems quite simple, but I am having a hard time writing the correct implementation, especially the **BFS** part. Here is my submission, which WAs on Test-6 — [Link](https://codeforces.net/contest/1004/submission/116194105)↵
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I tried reading the editorial and saw that one of the folks had a binary search approach, but I am not able to understand how did he implement the bfs part. — [Link to the comment](https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/60443?#comment-442943) | [Link to the submission of the folk](https://codeforces.net/contest/1004/submission/40004166)↵
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Thanks :D