I found this solution but I don't understand it. Can anyone explain the idea behind it ?
A O(n) time and O(1) extra space solution:
The idea is similar to this post. We use array elements as index. To mark presence of an element x, we change the value at the index x to negative. But this approach doesn’t work if there are non-positive (-ve and 0) numbers. So we segregate positive from negative numbers as first step and then apply the approach.Following is the two step algorithm.
Segregate positive numbers from others i.e., move all non-positive numbers to left side. In the following code, segregate() function does this part.
Now we can ignore non-positive elements and consider only the part of array which contains all positive elements. We traverse the array containing all positive numbers and to mark presence of an element x, we change the sign of value at index x to negative. We traverse the array again and print the first index which has positive value.