In the world of sharing and fairness, the distribute candies challenge of LeetCode is really interesting. It’s about figuring out how to give a limited number of candies to a group of people so that everyone gets a fair amount, following certain rules. This problem is like real-life situations where we have to share resources fairly, like giving money to different departments of an organization or distributing supplies to people affected by some disaster.
We are given
Here is the list of requirements to remember:
Our task is to determine the maximum number of different candies that we can share. The result would be a number of different types of candies. Let’s try to map our problem into a visual for better understanding.
Educative-99 helps you solve complex coding problems like distribute candies by teaching you to recognize patterns and apply the right algorithms.
There are
Let’s write down the algorithm steps:
Find the total number of candies to share (half of the total candies).
Find the total number of types of candies (unique candies).
If the types of candies are less than the total number of candies to be shared, return the total types of candies.
Otherwise, return half of the total number of candies.
Now you have understood the problem and are capable of finding the maximum types of candies to be shared.
According to the above algorithm, how many types of candies can we share from the following collection of candies?
🍬, 🍭, 🍫, 🍡, 🍪, 🌰, 🍬, 🍬, 🍭, 🍫
4
5
6
Let’s implement the above algorithm below:
def distributeCandies(candyType: list[int]) -> int:max_candies = len(candyType)//2 # finding the total number of candies to be sharedunique_candies = len(set(candyType)) # finding the total number of types of candies# checking if the unique_candies are less than the maximum candies to be sharedif unique_candies < max_candies:return unique_candies # return the unique_candiesreturn max_candies # otherwise return the max_candies to be shared# ---------------------------------------------------------------------candySet1 = [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3] # candy set 1print("For the candy set:", candySet1, end="")print(", we can share", distributeCandies(candySet1), "type(s) of candies!")candySet2 = [1, 1, 2, 3] # candy set 2print("For the candy set:", candySet2, end="")print(", we can share", distributeCandies(candySet2), "type(s) of candies!")candySet3 = [6, 6, 6, 6] # candy set 3print("For the candy set:", candySet3, end="")print(", we can share", distributeCandies(candySet3), "type(s) of candies!")candySet4 = ['🍬', '🍭', '🍫', '🍡', '🍪', '🌰', '🍬', '🍬', '🍭', '🍫'] # candy set 4print("For the candy set:", candySet4, end="")print(", we can share", distributeCandies(candySet4), "type(s) of candies!")
In the above implementation, we use:
Finding the length takes the constant time:
Finding unique elements takes the linear time:
Condition check takes the constant time:
By the above distribution, the time complexity is linear:
In the above implementation, we use:
Two variables to store two integer values.
The set of unique candies to store at most
By the above distribution, the space complexity is linear:
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