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Solution: The Number of the Smallest Unoccupied Chair

Understand how to use min heaps to efficiently assign the smallest unoccupied chair to arriving friends at a party. This lesson walks through sorting arrival times, managing chair availability with two heaps, and optimizing the solution for coding interviews with O(n log n) complexity.

Statement

At a party, nn friends, numbered from 00 to n1n - 1, arrive and leave at different times. There are infinitely many chairs, numbered 00 onwards. Each arriving friend sits on the smallest available chair at that moment.

For example, ...