1431. Kids With the Greatest Number of Candies

Tags: #array #easy

Problem Statement

There are n kids with candies. You are given an integer array candies, where each candies[i] represents the number of candies the ith kid has, and an integer extraCandies, denoting the number of extra candies that you have.

Return a boolean array result of length n, where result[i] is true if, after giving the ith kid all the extraCandies, they will have the greatest number of candies among all the kids__, or false otherwise.

Note that multiple kids can have the greatest number of candies.

Input: candies = [4,2,1,1,2], extraCandies = 1
Output: [true,false,false,false,false] 
Explanation: There is only 1 extra candy.
Kid 1 will always have the greatest number of candies, even if a different kid is given the extra candy.

My approach

def func(candies, extraCandies):
    maximum = max(candies)
    result = [False for i in candies]
    for i in range(len(candies)):
        x = candies[i]
        if x+extraCandies >= maximum:
            result[i] = True
    return result

Here, first I take the maximum from the candies and also initialise an array of Falses into result the size of candies list. Then, I check each candy x against the maximum and convert the candy's position as True in the result.

import numpy as np

def func(candies, extraCandies):
    np_array = np.array(candies)
    return ((np_array+extraCandies) >= extraCandies)

This is another approach that I thought of using the numpy package since it just natively returned a Boolean array when a condition is passed to a numpy.array.

Personal Thoughts

This problem wasn't that difficult and was fairly obvious once you thought about it. And about using external libraries, I'm totally fine with using them even though they might obfuscate the underlying logic and add an abstraction layer.