Smallest Rotation with Highest Score

 Given an array A, we may rotate it by a non-negative integer K so that the array becomes A[K], A[K+1], A{K+2], ... A[A.length - 1], A[0], A[1], ..., A[K-1].  Afterward, any entries that are less than or equal to their index are worth 1 point. 

For example, if we have [2, 4, 1, 3, 0], and we rotate by K = 2, it becomes [1, 3, 0, 2, 4].  This is worth 3 points because 1 > 0 [no points], 3 > 1 [no points], 0 <= 2 [one point], 2 <= 3 [one point], 4 <= 4 [one point].

Over all possible rotations, return the rotation index K that corresponds to the highest score we could receive.  If there are multiple answers, return the smallest such index K.

Example 1:
Input: [2, 3, 1, 4, 0]
Output: 3
Explanation:  
Scores for each K are listed below: 
K = 0,  A = [2,3,1,4,0],    score 2
K = 1,  A = [3,1,4,0,2],    score 3
K = 2,  A = [1,4,0,2,3],    score 3
K = 3,  A = [4,0,2,3,1],    score 4
K = 4,  A = [0,2,3,1,4],    score 3

So we should choose K = 3, which has the highest score.

 

Example 2:
Input: [1, 3, 0, 2, 4]
Output: 0
Explanation:  A will always have 3 points no matter how it shifts.
So we will choose the smallest K, which is 0.

Note:


Solution:

This problem can be thought of as a transformation to a more well known problem. After we have the transformation, we can solve it effiently.


Definitions
Let A be the input array, and N be the number of elements in the array. Let A[i] denote the value at index i in input array A. And let K be the number of rotations.


The Transformation
For every number in the array, write the ranges which the value will yield a score of + 1.


Example:
A: [2, 3, 1, 4, 0]
Range for 2: [1, 3] (Rotating the array for any value of 1 <= K <= 3 will give us a point for 2.
Range for 3: [2, 3]
Range for 1: [0, 1] and [3, 4]
... and so on


After doing that, the value of K that gives the highest score is the value that is common to the most # of ranges. The question is how do we solve for that value? A simple approach would be to keep an array, called count, with indices from 0 to 4, and add 1 to each indice for every range that contains it. At the end the best value of k is the indice for which count has the largest value.


Example:
count would look like this if we added + 1 for range [1, 3]: count [0, 1, 1, 1, 0]. We would continue to add for every range. So after adding range [2, 3], count would look like [0, 1, 2, 2, 0] ... and so on.


But this would be O(n^2). We can improve this by making a simple adaptation. To represent some range [a, b] we can instead add +1 to only the indice a, and subtract 1 to the last b + 1 (if it exists). This would mean that we add +1 to every index >= a, and subtract -1 to every index b + 1. After doing this for every range, we can accumate from the front, we should get the same array count, as we did with out n^2 version.

class Solution {
    public int bestRotation(int[] A) {
        int n = A.length;
        int[] a = new int[n];  // to record interval start/end
        // [2, 3, 1, 4, 0]
        // 2 -> [1, 3]
        // 3 -> [2, 3]
        // 1 -> [3, 4], [0, 1] -> [3, 1]
        // 4 -> [4]
        // 0 -> [0, 4]
        for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
            System.out.println("<" + (i + 1) % n + ", " + (i + 1 - A[i] + n) % n + ">");
            int start = (i + 1) % n; // move i to n - 1
            int end = (i + 1 + n - A[i]) % n; // 
            a[start] ++; // interval start
            a[end] --;  // interval end (exclusive)
            if (start > end) a[0] ++;
        }
        int count = 0;
        int maxCount = -1;
        int res = 0;
        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(a));
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {  // find most overlap interval
            count += a[i];
            if (count > maxCount) {
                res = i;
                maxCount = count;
            }
        }
        return res;
    }
}