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Problem

Get Minimum Amount

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Problem statement

The manager of the Amazon warehouse has decided to make changes to the inventory. Currently, the inventory has n products, where the quality of the ith product after quality checks is represented by the array element quality[i].

The manager wants to create an optimal inventory, where the array of products quality follows the following property:

  • All occurrences of each quality value must be contiguous.

In order to convert the inventory into an optimal inventory, the manager can do the following operation any number of times:

  1. Choose two quality values x and y.
  2. Replace every product with quality x to have quality y instead.
  3. This operation costs num_replacements units of money, where num_replacements is the number of products whose quality was changed.

Given n products and an array quality, find the minimum amount of money the manager has to spend to convert the inventory into an optimal inventory.

Note: The quality of a product can be negative indicating that the product is of poor quality.

Function

getMinAmount(quality: int[]) → int

Complete the function getMinAmount in the editor below.

getMinAmount has the following parameter(s):

int quality[n]: the quality of products

Returns

int: the minimum amount of money the manager has to spend to convert the inventory into an optimal inventory.

Examples

Example 1

quality = [7, 7, 5, 7, 3, 5, 3]return = 4
Example 1 illustration

Given n = 7, quality = [7, 7, 5, 7, 3, 5, 3].

One of the optimal ways to convert is explained below:

Hence, the total amount spent is 4.

More Amazon problems

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public int getMinAmount(int[] quality) {
  // write your code here
}
quality[7, 7, 5, 7, 3, 5, 3]
expected4
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