The Lone Survivor

The Lone Survivor (XOR Paradox)

In a crowded field of pairs, one element stands alone. Every number in your list appears exactly twice, except for one solitary value. While you could use a Map to count them, there is a brilliant bitwise trick using the XOR ($oplus$) operator that can find the survivor instantly without any extra memory!

The Assignment

Your mission is to find the single element. Your function receives an array nums.

1. Initialize a variable result to 0.
2. Iterate through every number in the array.
3. Use the XOR operator (^) to combine the current number with the result.
4. Because $A oplus A = 0$ and $A oplus 0 = A$, all pairs will cancel each other out, leaving only the "Lone Survivor."
5. Print the final result.