Kids With the Greatest Number of Candies
Easy · Arrays & Hashing · Array
Problem
There are n kids, and kid i has candies[i] candies. You also hold extraCandies candies, which you could hand, all of them, to a single kid.
For every kid, decide whether giving them all the extra candies would leave them with the greatest number of candies among all the kids. Ties count: several kids may share the greatest number.
Return a list of booleans result of length n, where result[i] is True when kid i could end up with the most, and False otherwise. Each kid is considered on their own: the other kids keep only their own candies.
Examples
Input: candies = [2, 3, 5, 1, 3], extraCandies = 3 Output: [True, True, True, False, True]
The current maximum is 5. Kid 3 would reach only 1 + 3 = 4; every other kid reaches at least 5.
Input: candies = [4, 2, 1, 1, 2], extraCandies = 1 Output: [True, False, False, False, False]
Only kid 0, who already has 4, stays at the top; the next best would reach 3.
Input: candies = [12, 1, 12], extraCandies = 10 Output: [True, False, True]
Kid 1 reaches 11, one short of 12.
Constraints
- 2 <= len(candies) <= 10^4
- 1 <= candies[i] <= 100
- 1 <= extraCandies <= 50
Approaches
- Check every kid against every other — time O(n²), space O(1) besides the answer
Follow-up
How many extra candies would each kid need to lead on their own, strictly ahead of everyone? And what is the smallest gift that would let at least k kids be among the greatest?
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