Assign Cookies

GreedyTwo Pointers

15 min

Problem Statement

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

Example 1:

Input: g = [1,2,3], s = [1,1]

g: [1, 2, 3], s: [1, 1]

Output: 1

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 can only make the child whose greed factor is 1 content.

Solution

The greedy approach is to give the smallest cookie to the child with the smallest greed factor. By sorting both the greed factors and the cookie sizes, we can iterate through them and assign cookies to children whenever possible.

Algorithm Steps

Sort the greed factor array `g` and the cookie size array `s`.
Initialize two pointers, one for `g` and one for `s`.
Iterate while both pointers are within their array bounds.
If the current cookie can satisfy the current child's greed, assign it and move both pointers.
Otherwise, move the cookie pointer to try a larger cookie for the same child.
The number of content children is the final value of the child pointer.

Assign Cookies

Greedy with Two Pointers

Input: g = [1, 2, 3], s = [1, 1]

Output: 0

Progress1 / 1

Ready to start the visualization

Greed Factors (g)

Cookie Sizes (s)

Content Children

Assign Cookies Solution


class Solution:
    def findContentChildren(self, g: list[int], s: list[int]) -> int:
        g.sort()
        s.sort()
        
        child_i = cookie_j = 0
        while child_i < len(g) and cookie_j < len(s):
            if s[cookie_j] >= g[child_i]:
                child_i += 1
            cookie_j += 1
        return child_i