I recently saw a question and was stuck on it for quite some time. Let's say if there are 'n' people standing is a circle. Now I will talk to the 1st person, then skip next 'a' people and talk to (a+2)-th person. I am supposed to calculate the number of people I have to talk to, before I can talk to the 1st person again.

Eg 1: The number of people = 10. The number of people to skip = 3.

so, the order in which I will go to people is -> 1 5 9 3 7 1 here, we can see that I had to go through 4 people to reach to 1 again.

Eg 2: The number of people = 10. The number of people to skip = 1

the order to reach out to people -> 1 3 5 7 9 1 here, 4 people were visited before reaching to 1 again.

Now the naive approach to solving this problem will be to iterate over the array but that will give me a time complexity of O(n) but if the number of people standing in the circle is of the order 10^18. This will not work.I think a better way to approach this problem would be by the help of gcd operation but I am not able to figure out the correct specifics of that approach. Also, Is there a approach to solve these type of questions.