How to tell if an array is a permutation in O(n)?

Question

Input: A read-only array of N elements containing integer values from 1 to N (some integer values can appear more than once!). And a memory zone of a fixed<

Answer 1

First, an information theoretic reason why this may be possible. We can trivially check that the numbers in the array are in bounds in O(N) time and O(1) space. To specify any such array of in-bounds numbers requires N log N bits of information. But to specify a permutation requires approximately (N log N) - N bits of information (Stirling's approximation). Thus, if we could acquire N bits of information during testing, we might be able to know the answer. This is trivial to do in N time (in fact, with M static space we can pretty easily acquire log M information per step, and under special circumstances we can acquire log N information).

On the other hand, we only get to store something like M log N bits of information in our static storage space, which is presumably much less than N, so it depends greatly what the shape of the decision surface is between "permutation" and "not".

I think that this is almost possible but not quite given the problem setup. I think one is "supposed" to use the cycling trick (as in the link that Iulian mentioned), but the key assumption of having a tail in hand fails here because you can index the last element of the array with a permutation.