How should I practice Minimum Operations to Transform Array?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Nutanix onsite interview problems in FastPrep.

Is Minimum Operations to Transform Array associated with Nutanix?

FastPrep tags this as a Nutanix onsite interview coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Problem · Array

Minimum Operations to Transform Array

Learn this problem

● Medium

NutanixFULLTIMEONSITE INTERVIEW

Problem statement

You are given two integer arrays:

a with length n
b with length n + 1

You may perform the following operations on a:

Increment any element by 1.
Decrement any element by 1.
Copy any current element of a and append the copy to the end of a.

After all operations, the first n positions of a must equal the first n positions of b, and the appended element must equal b[n].

Return the minimum number of operations required.

Function

minimumOperationsToTransformArray(a: int[], b: int[]) → long

Examples

Example 1

a = [1]b = [2,3]return = 3

Increment 1 to 2, copy the value, then increment the copied value to 3. This takes 3 operations.

Example 2

a = [3,3,3]b = [3,3,3,3]return = 1

Copy any existing 3 and append it to the end.

Example 3

a = [5,2,1,4,6]b = [4,1,5,4,6,7]return = 8

The first five positions require 6 total increment/decrement operations. Copying a value costs 1; the best copied value can be adjusted to 7 with one additional operation, for a total of 8.

Constraints

a and b are integer arrays.
a has length n, and b has length n + 1.