Question

Could someone please help me solve this in Python? Brief explanation of the code comments would be greatly appreciated.

indices_second_biggest: This function returns a list containing the indices of the second largest value in its sole argument, a nonempty matrix (list of lists), i.e. [row index, col index]. If the largest value occurs more than once, it counts as the second largest also. If there is only one element in the matrix, return [0, 0].

Answer 1

def indices_Second_biggest(a):
    if len(a)==1:
        if len(a[0]==1):
            return [0,0]
    else:
        max = [-1000000,-1,-1]
        #Take max to be a very large negative value
        #Taking the each row one by one
        for i in range(len(a)):
            #Iterating through each column of the selected row
            for j in range(len(a[i])):
                if a[i][j]>max[0]:
                    second_max = max
                    max = [a[i][j], i, j]
        return [second_max[1],second_max[2]]


#Input
a = [[2,5,8],[1,8,12],[13,14,17]]
x = indices_Second_biggest(a)
print (x)