2025-11-20
757. Set Intersection Size At Least Two

Topic: Array, Greedy, Sorting
Difficulty: Hard

Problem:
You are given a 2D integer array intervals where intervals[i] = [start_i, end_i] represents all the integers from start_i to end_i inclusively.

A containing set is an array nums where each interval from intervals has at least two integers in nums.

• For example, if intervals = [[1,3], [3,7], [8,9]], then [1,2,4,7,8,9] and [2,3,4,8,9] are containing sets.

Return the minimum possible size of a containing set.

Example 1:

Input: intervals = [[1,3],[3,7],[8,9]]
Output: 5
Explanation: let nums = [2, 3, 4, 8, 9].
It can be shown that there cannot be any containing array of size 4.

Example 2:

Input: intervals = [[1,3],[1,4],[2,5],[3,5]]
Output: 3
Explanation: let nums = [2, 3, 4].
It can be shown that there cannot be any containing array of size 2.

Example 3:

Input: intervals = [[1,2],[2,3],[2,4],[4,5]]
Output: 5
Explanation: let nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
It can be shown that there cannot be any containing array of size 4.

Constraints:

• 1 <= intervals.length <= 3000
• intervals[i].length == 2
• 0 <= start_i < end_i <= 10^8