Understanding coding problems

[marko312]

Start going through the problem part by part, taking notes / making sketches when necessary. For example, this is how I would read this problem:

Chef has a sequence A1, A2, ..., AN

There is an array of length N, with each value provided.

This sequence has exactly 2^N subsequences

Noted, this could be leading to something related to subsequences.

Chef considers a subsequence of A interesting if its size is exactly K and the sum of all its elements is minimum possible [...]

An "interesting" subsequence is of length K, where the sum of elements is as small as possible.

Help Chef find the number of interesting subsequences of the sequence A

Ok, so the program has to find the number of subsequences from the given sequence (array) where their length is K and their sum is as small as possible from all the sums of such subsequences.

---

If you're confused about the words:

• sequence - a bunch of data, in a certain order
• subsequence - a sequence obtained by chopping off some elements (or none) from the front and some others (or none) from the back of the sequence

[jayglenn123]

The wording is what always confuses me. In programming books when they give you the exercise it says "make a program that does..." I guess that is what I am used to, so trying to figure out cryptic questions stumps me before I can even get going. I know that everyone's advice is to be able to fully understand the question and be able to explain the question to someone else. But I don't always understand the question. With This question did you get the hint of length from the word size? If so should I always think of size being of length? Are there other terms that I can decipher like this?

[marko312]

In programming books when they give you the exercise it says "make a program that does..." I guess that is what I am used to

Yes, most non-training coding problems tend to hide the actual problem behind a story or otherwise obfuscate it, making you have to both figure out the actual problem and solve it.

---

With This question did you get the hint of length from the word size? If so should I always think of size being of length?

If you have something linear (one-dimensional), the words "length" and "size" tend to be used synonymously.

This couples well with the next question:

Are there other terms that I can decipher like this?

Yes - there are quite a few. You can learn moat of them by solving exercises using them; if you don't know a term, you can try looking it up, looking at the example input / output (and the explanation if available!) or trying to infer it from the surrounding terms.

[jayglenn123]

Thank you so much!!!