How to find second largest number in a list?

Question

So I have to find the second largest number from list. I am doing it through simple loops.

My approach is to divide a list into two parts and then find the largest n

Answer 1

I'm amazed that most answers (except by Christian) didn't try to answer OP's real question of finding the solution using divide-and-conquer approach.

This question is almost identical to this question: Finding the second smallest number from the given list using divide-and-conquer, but it tries to find the least instead of the largest.

For which this is my answer:

def two_min(arr):
    n = len(arr)
    if n==2:
        if arr[0]

You can try to understand the code and change it to take the two largest. Basically you divide the array into two parts, then return the two largest numbers from the two parts. Then you compare the four numbers from the two parts, take the largest two, return.

This code has a bonus also for limiting the number of comparisons to 3n/2 - 2.