Pixels in a digital picture can be represented with three integers in the range $0$ to $255$ that indicate the intensity of the red, green, and blue colors. To compress an image or to create an artistic effect, many photo-editing tools include a “posterize” operation which works as follows. Each color channel is examined separately; this problem focuses only on the red channel. Rather than allow all integers from $0$ to $255$ for the red channel, a posterized image allows at most $k$ integers from this range. Each pixel’s original red intensity is replaced with the nearest of the allowed integers. The photo-editing tool selects a set of $k$ integers that minimizes the sum of the squared errors introduced across all pixels in the original image. If there are $n$ pixels that have original red values $r_1,…,r_n$, and $k$ allowed integers $v_1,…,v_k$, the sum of squared errors is defined as
$\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n}\min\limits_{1 \le j \le k}(r_i-v_j)^2$.
Your task is to compute the minimum achievable sum of squared errors, given parameter $k$ and a description of the red intensities of an image’s pixels.