575. Distribute Candies

Ved Prakash
2 min readMar 1, 2021

LEVEL : Easy

QUESTION :

Alice has n candies, where the ith candy is of type candyType[i]. Alice noticed that she started to gain weight, so she visited a doctor.

The doctor advised Alice to only eat n / 2 of the candies she has (n is always even). Alice likes her candies very much, and she wants to eat the maximum number of different types of candies while still following the doctor's advice.

Given the integer array candyType of length n, return the maximum number of different types of candies she can eat if she only eats n / 2 of them.

Example 1:

Input: candyType = [1,1,2,2,3,3]
Output: 3
Explanation: Alice can only eat 6 / 2 = 3 candies. Since there are only 3 types, she can eat one of each type.

Example 2:

Input: candyType = [1,1,2,3]
Output: 2
Explanation: Alice can only eat 4 / 2 = 2 candies. Whether she eats types [1,2], [1,3], or [2,3], she still can only eat 2 different types.

Example 3:

Input: candyType = [6,6,6,6]
Output: 1
Explanation: Alice can only eat 4 / 2 = 2 candies. Even though she can eat 2 candies, she only has 1 type.

Constraints:

  • n == candyType.length
  • 2 <= n <= 104
  • n is even.
  • -105 <= candyType[i] <= 105

SOULTION :

Two conditions :-

1. If number of unique elements greater than equal to n/2

In this case answer would be n/2

Ex : [1,1,2,3]
unique — 3 (1,2,3)
n/2 = 2
so answer is 2 (1,2) or (1,3) or (2,3)

Ex : [1,1,2,2,3,3]
unique — 3(1,2,3)
n/2 = 3
answer is 3

2. If number of unique elements less than n/2

In this case answer would be uniques counts

MY CODE :

class Solution {
public:
int distributeCandies(vector<int>& candyType) {
int n = candyType.size();
int limit = n/2; // doctor's limit
int count = 0; // to count unique type candies

unordered_map<int,int> map;
// number of occurence mapping
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
map[candyType[i]]++;
}
// count for unique elements
for(auto each : map) {
count++;
}
return count > limit ? limit : count;
}
};

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