(Analysis by Dhruv Rohatgi)

A first observation is that if some cow never receives a gift, then her rank in the queue (that is, the number of cows ahead of her in the queue) never increases. This has several consequences. First, none of the cows after her can receive a gift, since it's impossible for one cow to actively overtake" another. So the set of cows who never receive gifts actually forms a suffix of the list of cows, and our problem is to find the length of this suffix.

Consider the first cow who never receives a gift. Her rank never reaches $0$. So after a sufficiently long time, she will attain some minimum rank $k$. By our previous observation, she will remain at this rank forever. It follows that no cow in front of her will jump behind her upon reaching the head of the queue. But every cow in front of her reaches the head at some point, since she is by choice the first cow to not reach the head. Thus all $k$ cows in front of her have skipping number at least $N-k$. Rephrasing skipping numbers in terms of ranks, all $k$ cows in front of her jump to ranks at most $k$. In the original permutation of cows, these $k$ cows (and possibly some other cows) must already have been ahead of her, since overtaking" cannot happen.

So for any cow who never receives a gift, there is some positive integer $k$ such that there are $k$ cows ahead of her with jumping numbers" at most $k$. It turns out that this condition is also sufficient for a cow to not receive a gift. Suppose that there is a cow who receives a gift (call her Moomoo), but who is preceded by $k$ cows with jumping numbers at most $k$. We claim by induction that at every timestep, Moomoo is preceded by $k$ cows with jumping numbers at most $k$. To see this, suppose one of these $k$ cows has reached the head of the queue. This cow will jump to a rank at most $k$. But Moomoo's rank is at least $k$, by our inductive hypothesis. So the jumping cow will remain in front of Moomoo. By induction, Moomoo never reaches the head of the queue (and in particular, never has rank less than $k$).

So now we simply need to find the first cow for whom there is some positive integer $k$ such that there are $k$ cows ahead of her with jumping numbers" at most $k$, where the jumping number of cow $i$ is simply $N - c_i$. This can be done in $O(N \log N)$ time: binary search for the first such cow. To check if a given cow satisfies the condition, compute for each $k$ the number of cows in front of the given cow with number at exactly $k$, and then check for each $k$ if the $k^\text{th}$ partial sum is at least $k$.

Below is Travis Hance's solution implementing this idea.

#include <cstdio>
#include <cassert>
#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>

#define NMAX 2000005

int c[NMAX];

int num[NMAX+1];

bool all_recv(int k, int n) {
for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
num[i] = 0;
}
for (int i = 0; i < k-1; i++) {
num[c[i]]++;
}
int total = 0;
for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
total += num[i];
if (total >= i) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}

int main() {
int n;
scanf("%d",&n);
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
int d;
scanf("%d", &d);
assert(0 <= d && d < n);
c[i] = n - d;
}

// lo <= the answer < hi
int lo = 1;
int hi = n+1;
while (hi > lo + 1) {
int mid = (lo + hi) / 2;
if (all_recv(mid, n)) {
lo = mid;
} else {
hi = mid;
}
}

int ans = lo;
printf("%d\n", n - ans);
}