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Solution: Minimum Cost to Hire K Workers

Explore the strategy to hire exactly k workers while minimizing total wages under proportional pay rules. Understand wage-to-quality ratios and use a max heap to efficiently solve this optimization problem with a top k elements pattern.

Statement

You are given nn workers, each characterized by two attributes:

  • quality[i]: Represents the work quality of the ithi^{th} worker.

  • wage[i]: Represents the minimum wage expectation of the ithi^{th} worker.

You want to hire exactly k workers to form a paid group, and you must follow these payment rules:

  1. Wage expectation: Every worker in the group must be paid at least their minimum wage expectation.

  2. Proportional pay: The pay for each worker must be directly proportional to their quality. For example, if one worker’s quality is twice that of another, they must be paid twice as much.

Your goal is to determine the least amount of money required to hire exactly k workers while satisfying the above conditions.

Constraints

  • n ==== quality.length == ...