ayaskant.swain
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AnswersAsked at Walmart Labs
- ayaskant.swain in India for R&D
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There is a row of seats. Assume that it contains 15 seats adjacent to each other. There is a group of people who are already seating in that row randomly. i.e. some are sitting together & some are scattered.
Take the row as a String in java.
The seat which is occupied is marked with a character 'X' & which is not occupied is marked with a dot '.'
Now your target is to make the whole group sit together i.e. next to each other and without having any vacant seat between them in such a way that the total number of hops or jumps at the end of the grouping them together should be minimum.
Ok let me try to explain you in details.
Here is the row having 15 seats represented by the String (0, 1, 2, 3, ......... , 14) -
. . . . x . . x x . . . x . .
Now to make them sit together one of approaches is - . . . . . . x x x x . . . . .
Following are the steps to achieve this -
1 - Move the person sitting at 4th index to 6th index - Number of jumps by him = (6 - 4) = 2
2 - Bring the person sitting at 12th index to 9th index - Number of jumps by him = (12 - 9) = 3
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So now the total number of jumps made = ( 2 + 3) = 5 which is the minimum possible jumps to make them seat together.
There are also other ways to make them sit together but the number of jumps will exceed 5 & that will not be minimum.
For example bring them all towards the starting of the row i.e. start placing them from index 0. In that case the total number of jumps will be ( 4 + 6 + 6 + 9 ) = 25 which is very costly and not an optimized way to do this movement.
Now write an algorithm which will return the minimum number of jumps required to make them sit together.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Walmart Labs Senior Software Development Engineer Algorithm
Vikram, Your solution looks good. I will try it in java. Thanks for posting it.
- ayaskant.swain November 04, 2014