SDE - 1

Ram went to a specialty candy store in Ninjaland which has 'N' candies with different costs.

The Candy shop gives a special offer to its customers. A customer can buy a single candy from the store and get at most 'K' different candies for free. Now, Ram is interested in knowing the maximum and the minimum amount he needs to spend for buying all the candies available in the store.

Note: In both cases, Ram must utilize the offer i.e. if 'K' or more candies are available, he must take 'K' candies for every candy purchase. If less than K candies are available, he must take all candies for a candy purchase.

For Example :

For 'N' =  5 and 'K' = 2

Let the cost of different candies in the store be: [9 8 2 6 4]

For the minimum amount: 
Ram can buy a candy with cost 2 and take candies with costs 9 and 8 for free. 
Then, he can buy a candy with cost 4 and take candy with cost 7 for free. 
Thus, the minimum cost will be 6 i.e. 2 + 4. 

For the maximum amount: 
Ram can buy a candy with cost 9 and take candies with costs 2 and 6 for free. 
Then, he can buy candy at cost 8 and take candy at cost 4 for free. 
Thus, the minimum cost will be 17 i.e. 9 + 8.

Thus, Minimum = 6 and Maximum = 17.

You are given a circular array consisting of N integers. You have to find the maximum sum of the absolute difference between adjacent elements with rearrangement of array element allowed i.e after rearrangement of element find the maximum value of |a1 – a2| + |a2 – a3| + …… + |an – 1– an| + |an – a1|, where a1, a2, a3… an are the elements of the array.

An array is a circular array when after the last element 'an', 'a1' appears in the array.

You have been given 'N' ropes of different lengths, we need to connect these ropes into one rope. The cost to connect two ropes is equal to sum of their lengths. We need to connect the ropes with minimum cost.

The test-data is such that the result will fit into a 32-bit integer.

For a given array with N elements, you need to find the length of the longest subsequence from the array such that all the elements of the subsequence are sorted in strictly increasing order.

Strictly Increasing Sequence is when each term in the sequence is larger than the preceding term.

For example:

[1, 2, 3, 4] is a strictly increasing array, while [2, 1, 4, 3] is not.