SDE - Intern

Prateek is a kindergarten teacher. He wants to give some candies to the children in his class. All the children stand in a line and each of them has a grade according to his or her performance in the class. Prateek wants to give at least one candy to each child. If two children are standing adjacent to each other, then the one with the higher rating must get more candies than the other. Prateek wants to minimize the total number of candies he must buy.

Given an array 'STUDENTS' of size 'N' that contains the grades for each student, your task is to find what is the minimum number of candies Prateek must buy so that he can distribute them among his students according to the criteria given above.

Example :

Given students' ratings : [5, 8, 1, 5, 9, 4]. 
He gives the students candy in the following minimal amounts : [1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1]. He must buy a minimum of 10 candies.

Note :

1. If two students having the same grade are standing next to each other, they may receive the same number of candies.
2. Every student must get at least a candy.

You are given a linked list of 'N' nodes where nodes can contain values 0, 1, and 2 only. Your task is to sort the linked list.

You have been given a Binary Tree of integers. You are supposed to return the level order traversal of the given tree.

For example:

For the given binary tree

The level order traversal will be {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}.

Have you faced any failure in your life and how do you deal with that?