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455. Assign Cookies

Difficulty: Easy

Related Topics: Array, Two Pointers, Greedy, Sorting

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.

Code:

class Solution:
    def findContentChildren(self, g: List[int], s: List[int]) -> int:
        g.sort()
        s.sort()
        m, n = len(g), len(s)
        count = 0
        ptr1, ptr2 = 0, 0
        while m > ptr1 and n > ptr2:
            if g[ptr1] > s[ptr2]:
                ptr2+=1
            else:
                ptr1+=1
                ptr2+=1
                count+=1
        return count

Feedbacks:

At first, I sorted the list of g and s first. Then, set two pointers ptr1 and ptr2. Ptr1 traverse through list g, and ptr2 traverse through list s. If the value ptr1 pointing is larger than value ptr2 pointing, it means child won’t content with the size of cookie, so I move to next cookie. If value ptr1 pointing is same or less than value ptr2 pointing, it means child will content with the size of cookie, So I increment count for 1, and move to next pointer for both pointers.

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