5th JLTi Code Jam – Jul 2017
Now that weight loss competition is back, some people are more than excited about it. And why not? After all, only by running 10 km in the last 3 days, they can effortlessly shed 15 kg!
On the other hand, slim people, by any global standard, like me have to starve an entire month and still have to win this competition only in dream, in some rainy days.
Since the enthusiastic participants approached me to participate, I am thinking of a new scoring system that would remove this inherent bias in the existing scoring system – deducting final weight from first day weight.
So here I propose a new scoring system that would otherwise value the sustained effort and success of the participants, ignoring the total/final/absolute loss.
Input: 73, 72.9, 72.8, 72.8, 72.9, 72.7, 72.0, 71.6, 73, 72.5, 72.4, 71.3, 73.5, 74
Output: 7
Explanation: The above is an estimation of my performance, if the competition runs for 14 days. You can clearly see I start with 73 and end up with 74. In the old standard, I gain weight and penalized. In the new scoring system I score 7. How? Well, it computes how long I keep on decreasing weight, without seeing how much. In the above example, the longest stretch where I continue to lose weight (a value in a sequence must be smaller than its immediate predecessor) is shown below.
73, 72.9, 72.8, 72.7, 72.0, 71.6, 71.3
Let us also find the approximate score of the last time winner. A possible set of weights of him might look like the below:
Input: 95, 94, 97, 89, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 100, 95, 90
Output: 4
His success story lies in the last 3 days of blitzkrieg (the first weight in the input does not necessarily need to be the first value in the sequence): 105, 100, 95, 90
Let us also talk about a hypothetical participant who misunderstands this to be a weight gain competition and eats cheese all along.
Input: 53, 53.1, 53.2, 53.4, 53.5, 53.6, 53.9, 54, 54.1, 54.2, 54.2, 54.7, 55.8, 56
Output: 1
The scorer takes note of 53 and it never goes towards the right direction.
Task: A good scoring system indeed – nobody gets zero or below. And I am sure all of you would agree with this. Now let us quickly write a small program that takes an array of weights and computes the score.
Sharing Experiences 