Algorithm Interview Question: Max and Min with Limited Comparisons

Hi, here's your problem today. This problem was recently asked by Microsoft:

Given a list of numbers of size n, where n is greater than 3, find the maximum and minimum of the list using less than 2 * (n - 1) comparisons.

Here's a start:

def find_min_max(nums):

  # Fill this in.



print find_min_max([3, 5, 1, 2, 4, 8])

# (1, 8)