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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns

Solution: Candy

Explore a greedy algorithm to distribute candies based on children's ratings, ensuring each child gets at least one candy and higher-rated children get more. Understand how to implement the solution with two passes over the ratings array, balancing candy counts while optimizing for minimum total candies.

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Statement

You are given an array ratings where ratings[i] represents the rating of the i-th child standing in a line. Your task is to distribute candies to each child based on the following rules:

  1. Every child must receive at least one candy.

  2. Children with a higher rating get more candies than their neighbors.

Determine the minimum total number of candies you must distribute to satisfy the above conditions.

Constraints:

  • 1≤1 \leq ratings.length ...