Order of People Heights for coding interview round

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Last Updated: 17 Feb, 2021

Order of People Heights

Ninja

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Problem statement

There are ‘N’ people numbered from 0 to N - 1, standing in a queue. You are given two arrays ‘Height’ and ‘Infront‘ consisting of ‘N’ non-negative integers. ‘Height[i]’ gives the height of the ith person, and ‘Infront[i]’ gives the number of persons who are taller than the ith person and standing in front of the ith person.

Your task is to find out the actual order of people in a queue. You should print ‘N’ integers where the ‘ith’ integer is the height of the person who should be at the ith position from the start of the queue.

Note :

1. Consider that all elements in array ‘Height’ are unique.
2. It is guaranteed that a valid order always exists for the given array ‘Height’ and ‘Infront’.

Example :

Let there are 6 people, their heights are given by array  ‘Height’ :  [5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4],  and the number of people in front of them is given by array ‘Infront’: [0, 1, 2, 0, 3, 2]

Thus the actual order of people’s height in the queue will be [5, 3, 2, 1, 6, 4]

In this order, the first person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 5, has no person in front of them who is taller than him.
The second person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 3 has 1 person (person with height 5) in front of them who is taller than him.
The third person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 2 has 2 people (people with height 5 and 3) in front of them who are taller than him.
The fourth person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 1 has 3 people (people with height 5, 3, 2) in front of them who are taller than him.
The fifth person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 6 has no person in front of them who is taller than him.
The sixth person in a queue i.e a person with a height of 4 has 2 people (people with height 5, and 6) in front of them who are taller than him.

We can observe this is the only possible order that is possible according to the array ‘Infront’.

Input format :

The first line of input contains an integer ‘T’ denoting the number of test cases.
The next 3 * 'T' lines represent the ‘T’ test cases.

The first line of each test case consists of a single integer ‘N’ representing the number of people in a queue.   
The second line of each test case consists of ‘N’ space-separated integers representing the array ‘Height’.
The third line of each test case consists of ‘N’ space-separated integers representing the array ‘Infront’.

Output format :

For each test case, print ‘N’ integers where the ‘ith’ integer is the height of the person who should be at the ith position from the start of the queue.

Print the output of each test case in a new line.

Note :

You do not need to print anything, it has already been taken care of. Just implement the given function.

Constraints :

1 <= T <= 50
1  <= N <=  10^4
1 <= Height[i] <= 10^9
0 <= Infront[i] < ‘N’

Where ‘T’ is the total number of test cases, ‘N’ is the number of people in the queue, Height[i], and Infront[i] respectively are height and number of people in front of ith who are taller than him.

Time limit: 1 sec

Solve now

Approaches

01Approach

There are ‘N’ people in a queue, so they can stand in N! ways in a queue. We one by one check for all of the permutations whether it is an actual order of people in a queue or not.

We can one by one generate all the permutations using the nextPermuation method as described below.

Create a function nextPermution(permutation, N) that finds the next permutation of a given array 'permutation’ of size ‘n’. In this function, we do the following.
- Start iterating the array from backward and find an index ‘i’ such that permutation[i] < permutation[i+1]. Return false, if such an index doesn’t exist.
- Find an index ‘j’ such that permutation[j] is the smallest integer in the suffix starting from ‘i’ for which condition permutation[j] > permutation[i] holds true.
- Swap permutation[i] with permutation[j].
- Reverse suffix starting from ‘i’.
- Return true as it indicates the next permutation exists. Note, in this approach, we have modified the given permutation to its lexicographically next permutation.

Algorithm

Create an array ‘permutation’ of size ‘N’ such that permutation[i]:= i.
Use method nextPermution(permutation, N) to one by generating all permutations of the array ‘permutation’ for each permutation we will do the following.
- Initialize a boolean variable flag:= true.
- Run a loop where ‘i’ ranges from ‘0’ to ‘N-1’.
  - Initialize an integer variable ‘tallerBefore‘:= 0
  - Run a loop where ‘j’ ranges from ‘0’ to ‘i-1’:
    - If height[permutation[j]] > height[permutation[i]], increment tallerBefore by one.
  - If tallerBefore != Infront[permuation[i]], assign flag := false and break this loop.
- If flag = true, Create an integer array ‘result’ of size ‘N’ such that result[i] = height[permuation[i]] and then return this array result .

Solve now

02Approach

Sort people by heights. Then iterate from shortest to tallest. In each step, you need an efficient way to put the next person in the correct position. Notice that the people we’ve already placed are not taller than the current person. And the people we place after are taller than the current. So we have to find the first empty place such that the number of empty positions in front of it is equal to the Infront value of this person.

For example, let there are 3 people, with Height = [5, 3, 1] and Infront = [0, 0, 1], Thus after sorting in increasing order of height , we get, Height = [1, 3, 5] and Infront = [1, 0, 0].

Let there are three positions in a queue i.e _ _ _

So first we place the person with height 1, after 1 empty position, ie _ 1 _.

Then we place, the person with height 3, such that there are exactly 0 empty positions before it, i.e 3 1 _,

Then we place, the person with height 5, such that there are exactly 0 empty positions before it, i.e 3 1 5

Thus [3, 1, 5] will be our required answer.

Algorithm

Sort the array ‘Height’ in increasing order and arrange the elements of array ‘Infront’ such that ‘Height[i]’ and ‘Infront[i]’, represent height and infront value of the same person after sorting. This can be done by creating a matrix people[][] of size n*2 such that people[i][0] = Height[i], and people[i][1] = Infront[i], sort this matrix people[][], according to increasing order of its first column i.e height, and then assign Height[i] := people[i][0] and Infront[i] := people[i][1].
Create an array ‘result’ of size ‘N’ and fill it with 0.
Run a loop where ’i’ ranges from 0 to ‘N-1’ and in each step do the following -;
- Initialize an integer variable ‘countEmpty’ := 0
- Run a loop where ‘j’ ranges from 0 to ‘N-1’ and in each iteration, if result[i]:= 0 and countEmpty < Infront[i], then increment countEmpty by one, otherwise if result[i]:= 0 and countEmpty == Infront[i], assign result[j] := Height[i] and break this inner loop.
Return ‘result’.

Solve now

03Approach

We can optimize the previous approach by using Segment Tree which is a data structure used to optimize range queries. In our problem, we need to efficiently find the kth empty slot.

To do that, we can build a segment tree, such that each of its nodes gives the number of empty slots in a particular range. Generally, we represent segment tree by an array, Here we will represent segment tree by array named as ‘tree’. In this array tree[0] will be the root of segment tree that will give the number of empty slots in the range [0, N-1], tree[1] will be left child of the root, that will give the number of empty slots in the range [0, (N-1)/2], tree[2] will be the right child of the root, that will give the number of empty slots in the range [(N-1)/2+1, N-1]. In general, for any node represented by a tree[i] and gives the number of the empty slot in the range [l, r], its left child is represented by a tree[2*i+1], which gives the number of empty slots in a range [l, (l+r)/2] and its right child is represented by a tree[2*i+2], which gives the number of empty slots in a range [(l+r)/2+1, r].

Now, we can use this segment tree to find kth empty slot efficiently, to do this we start from the root node and in each step check whether the desired empty exists in the range represented by its left node or right node.

Algorithm

Sort the array ‘Height’ in increasing order and arrange the elements of array ‘Infront’ such that ‘Height[i]’ and ‘Infront[i]’, represent height and infront value of the same person after sorting.
Create an array tree of size 4*N. It will represent our desire segment tree.
Build this segtree by keeping value of all leaf node 1(containing 1 empty slot), and for any internal node ‘i’ tree[i] = tree[2*i+1] + tree[2*i+2], i.e sum of its left and right child node.
Create an array ‘result’ of size ‘N’ and fill it with 0.
Run a loop where ’i’ ranges from 0 to ‘N-1’ and in each step do the following -;
- Recursively find the (infront[i] + 1)th empty slot using segtree and update segree accordingly.
- This can be done by calling a recursive function findEmptySlot(tree, root, left, right, k) where tree represents segment tree, root is the current root of segment tree, and we need to find Kth empty slot in the range [left, right] (range represent by root). We will call this function as findEmptySlot(tree, 0, 0, N-1, infront[i] + 1). And in each recursive step do the following steps -:
  - Decrement tree[root] by 1, as one slot in the range given by root, will be occupied.
  - If left == right, i.e we are at a leaf node, then return left as it will be our desired empty slot.
  - if tree[2*root+1] >= K, i.e its left child has more than K empty slot, then recur in left subtree i.e findEmptySlot(tree, 2*root+1, left, (left+right)/2, K), otherwise recur in right subtree i.e call findEmptySlot(tree, 2*root+2, (left+right)/2+1, right, K-tree[2*root+1]). Note that the Kth empty slot in range represented by root will be (K - tree[2*root+1])th empty slot in range represented by right node.
- Assign value return by this recursive function to result[i].
Return ‘result’.