Hackerrank | Birthday Candles Problem

You are in charge of the cake for a child’s birthday. You have decided the cake will have one candle for each year of their total age. They will only be able to blow out the tallest of the candles. Count how many candles are tallest.

Example

candles=[4,4,1,3]

The maximum height candles are  4 units high. There are 2 of them, so return 2 .

Function Description

Complete the function birthdayCakeCandles in the editor below.

birthdayCakeCandles has the following parameter(s):

• int candles[n]: the candle heights

Returns

• int: the number of candles that are tallest

Input Format

The first line contains a single integer,n , the size of candels[].
The second line contains  n space-separated integers, where each integer  describes the height of candles[i] .

Constraints

• 1<=n<=10^5
• 1<=candles[i]<=10^7

Sample Input 0

4
3 2 1 3

Sample Output 0

2

Explanation 0

Candle heights are [3,2,1,3] . The tallest candles are 3 units, and there are  2 of them.

Implementation

#!/bin/python3

import math
import os
import random
import re
import sys

#
# Complete the 'birthdayCakeCandles' function below.
#
# The function is expected to return an INTEGER.
# The function accepts INTEGER_ARRAY candles as parameter.
#

def birthdayCakeCandles(candles):
    # Write your code here
    maxval=max(candles)
    count=0
    for i in candles:
        if maxval==i:
            count=count+1
    return count

if __name__ == '__main__':
    fptr = open(os.environ['OUTPUT_PATH'], 'w')

    candles_count = int(input().strip())

    candles = list(map(int, input().rstrip().split()))

    result = birthdayCakeCandles(candles)

    fptr.write(str(result) + '\n')

    fptr.close()

Time Complexity

The time complexity of the provided birthdayCakeCandles function is O(n), where n is the number of candles in the input list. This is because the function iterates through the list once to find the maximum value (maxval) and then iterates through the list again to count the occurrences of the maximum value.

The max function itself has a time complexity of O(n) since it needs to examine each element in the list to find the maximum. The subsequent loop also has a time complexity of O(n), as it iterates through the list once. Therefore, the overall time complexity is dominated by the iteration through the list, resulting in a total time complexity of O(n).

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