[PhantomGremlin]

Yeah. That "fix" immediately jumped out at me in the sense of WTF??? All he did was double the max size of the array before his code fails again!

That so-called "fixed" code just couldn't do anything useful in a 32-bit address space. A billion 32-bit ints completely fills up the address space by itself. As you note, perhaps it could "technically" be possible to search a billion 8-bit bytes, but that's not what's being passed in to the function.

And if he's running in a 64-bit address space (otherwise how could he pass in an array of a billion ints), then he should be using 64-bit integer arithmetic. (I don't know enough about Java to know how feasible it is to do that).