#2829

Determine the Minimum Sum of a k-avoiding Array

Medium
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Approaches

💡

Intuition

Time O(n²)Space O(n)

The brute-force approach involves generating all possible arrays of length n and checking if they are k-avoiding. This method is straightforward but inefficient due to the large number of combinations.

⚙️

Algorithm

4 steps
  1. 1Step 1: Start with an empty array and initialize a sum variable to 0.
  2. 2Step 2: Iterate through the smallest positive integers, adding them to the array if they do not create a pair that sums to k.
  3. 3Step 3: Continue until the array reaches the desired length n.
  4. 4Step 4: Return the sum of the elements in the array.
solution.py15 lines
1# Full working Python code
2
3def min_k_avoiding_sum(n, k):
4    result = []
5    current_sum = 0
6    num = 1
7    while len(result) < n:
8        if (k - num) not in result:
9            result.append(num)
10            current_sum += num
11        num += 1
12    return current_sum
13
14# Example usage
15print(min_k_avoiding_sum(5, 4))  # Output: 18

Complexity note: The time complexity is O(n²) because for each number added, we check if its complement (k - num) is already in the array, which can take O(n) time in the worst case.

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