Solution: Minimum Operations to Make All Array Elements Equal
Explore how to compute the minimum operations needed to make all elements in an array equal to each query value. Learn to use sorting, prefix sums, and binary search to solve queries efficiently. Understand the balance of increasing and decreasing elements through calculated costs and improve your coding interview preparation with this pattern.
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Statement
You are given an array, nums, consisting of positive integers of size n and another array queries of size m. For each query queries, the goal is to make all elements of nums equal to queries[i]. To achieve this, you can perform the following operation any number of times:
Increase or decrease an element of
numsby 1.
Return an array answer of size m, where answer[i] is the minimum number of operations needed to make all elements of nums equal to queries[i]. After processing each query, the nums array is reset to its original state.
Constraints
nnums.lengthm...