Easy interview question got harder: given numbers 1..100, find the missing number(s) given exactly k are missing

Question

I had an interesting job interview experience a while back. The question started really easy:

Q1: We have a bag containing numbers

Answer 1

May be this algorithm can work for question 1:

1. Precompute xor of first 100 integers(val=1^2^3^4....100)
2. xor the elements as they keep coming from input stream ( val1=val1^next_input)
3. final answer=val^val1

Or even better:

def GetValue(A)
  val=0
  for i=1 to 100
    do
      val=val^i
    done
  for value in A:
    do
      val=val^value 
    done
  return val

This algorithm can in fact be expanded for two missing numbers. The first step remains the same. When we call GetValue with two missing numbers the result will be a a1^a2 are the two missing numbers. Lets say

val = a1^a2

Now to sieve out a1 and a2 from val we take any set bit in val. Lets say the ith bit is set in val. That means that a1 and a2 have different parity at ith bit position. Now we do another iteration on the original array and keep two xor values. One for the numbers which have the ith bit set and other which doesn't have the ith bit set. We now have two buckets of numbers, and its guranteed that a1 and a2 will lie in different buckets. Now repeat the same what we did for finding one missing element on each of the bucket.