Assign Cookies
Assign Cookies is a Easy Data Structures and Algorithms interview problem you can solve, run and submit on Thita.ai. It belongs to the Greedy Patterns pattern, in the Sorting Based subpattern.
Problem statement
Assume you are an awesome parent and want to give your children some cookies. But, you should give each child at most one cookie.
Each child i has a greed factor g[i], which is the minimum size of a cookie that the child will be content with; and each cookie j has a size s[j]. If s[j] >= g[i], we can assign the cookie j to the child i, and the child i will be content. Your goal is to maximize the number of your content children and output the maximum number.
Example 1: Input: g = [1,2,3], s = [1,1] Output: 1 Explanation: You have 3 children and 2 cookies. The greed factors of 3 children are 1, 2, 3. And even though you have 2 cookies, since their size is both 1, you could only make the child whose greed factor is 1 content.
You need to output 1.
Example 2: Input: g = [1,2], s = [1,2,3] Output: 2 Explanation: You have 2 children and 3 cookies. The greed factors of 2 children are 1, 2. You have 3 cookies and their sizes are big enough to gratify all of the children, You need to output 2.
Constraints: 1 <= g.length <= 3 104 0 <= s.length <= 3 104 1 <= g[i], s[j] <= 231 - 1
Topics and companies
Topics: Greedy.
Reported in interviews at Amazon.
How to practise Assign Cookies on Thita.ai
Starter code is provided in C, C#, C++, dart, elixir, erlang, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, python3, racket, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift and TypeScript. Your solution runs against 5 test cases for this problem, with the AI coach available for a hint when you are stuck rather than a finished answer. The reference solution runs in O(nlogn) time and O(1) space.
Open Assign Cookies in the code editor, or read the Assign Cookies editorial for a worked solution with its approach and complexity analysis.
Where Assign Cookies sits in the DSA pattern sheet
- Greedy Patterns pattern guide
- Sorting Based subpattern
- The full DSA patterns sheet
- All coding practice problems
Problems related to Assign Cookies
Other problems that use the same Sorting Based and Greedy Patterns techniques:
- Candy — Hard, same subpattern
- Queue Reconstruction by Height — Medium, same subpattern
- Two City Scheduling — Medium, same subpattern
- Distant Barcodes — Medium, same pattern
- Divide Intervals Into Minimum Number of Groups — Medium, same pattern
- Employee Free Time — Hard, same pattern