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Problem: Put Marbles in Bags

Medium
30 min
Explore how to divide marbles into k bags following specific constraints, calculate bag costs, and use sorting combined with binary search and other strategies to find the score difference. This lesson helps you apply sorting and search patterns to efficiently solve segmentation problems in coding interviews.

Statement

You are given k bags and a 0-indexed integer array, weights, where weights[i] represents the weight of the ithi^{th} marble.

Your task is to divide the marbles into the k bags according to the following rules:

  1. No bag can be empty.

  2. If the ithi^{th} marble and the jthj^{th} marble are placed in the same bag, then all marbles with indexes between i and j (inclusive) must also be placed in that same bag.

  3. If a bag contains all the marbles from index i to j (inclusive), its cost is calculated as weights[i] + weights[j].

After distributing the marbles, the sum of the costs of all the k bags is called the score.

Return the difference between the maximum and minimum scores achievable by distributing the marbles into the k bags.

Constraints:

  • 11 \leq k \leq weights.length 105\leq 10^5

  • 11 \leq weights[i] 109\leq 10^9

Problem
Ask
Submissions

Problem: Put Marbles in Bags

Medium
30 min
Explore how to divide marbles into k bags following specific constraints, calculate bag costs, and use sorting combined with binary search and other strategies to find the score difference. This lesson helps you apply sorting and search patterns to efficiently solve segmentation problems in coding interviews.

Statement

You are given k bags and a 0-indexed integer array, weights, where weights[i] represents the weight of the ithi^{th} marble.

Your task is to divide the marbles into the k bags according to the following rules:

  1. No bag can be empty.

  2. If the ithi^{th} marble and the jthj^{th} marble are placed in the same bag, then all marbles with indexes between i and j (inclusive) must also be placed in that same bag.

  3. If a bag contains all the marbles from index i to j (inclusive), its cost is calculated as weights[i] + weights[j].

After distributing the marbles, the sum of the costs of all the k bags is called the score.

Return the difference between the maximum and minimum scores achievable by distributing the marbles into the k bags.

Constraints:

  • 11 \leq k \leq weights.length 105\leq 10^5

  • 11 \leq weights[i] 109\leq 10^9