1742. Maximum Number of Balls in a Box

Problem

You are working in a ball factory where you have n balls numbered from lowLimit up to highLimit inclusive (i.e., n == highLimit - lowLimit + 1), and an infinite number of boxes numbered from 1 to infinity.

Your job at this factory is to put each ball in the box with a number equal to the sum of digits of the ball’s number. For example, the ball number 321 will be put in the box number 3 + 2 + 1 = 6 and the ball number 10 will be put in the box number 1 + 0 = 1.

Given two integers lowLimit and highLimit, return the number of balls in the box with the most balls.

https://leetcode.cn/problems/maximum-number-of-balls-in-a-box/

Example 1:

Input: lowLimit = 1, highLimit = 10
Output: 2
Explanation:
1
2
Box Number:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ...
Ball Count:  2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0  0  ...
Box 1 has the most number of balls with 2 balls.

Example 2:

Input: lowLimit = 5, highLimit = 15
Output: 2
Explanation:
1
2
Box Number:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ...
Ball Count:  1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 0  0  ...
Boxes 5 and 6 have the most number of balls with 2 balls in each.

Example 3:

Input: lowLimit = 19, highLimit = 28
Output: 2
Explanation:
1
2
Box Number:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ...
Ball Count:  0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2  0  0  ...
Box 10 has the most number of balls with 2 balls.

Constraints:

1 <= lowLimit <= highLimit <= 10⁵

Test Cases

1 2	class Solution: def countBalls(self, lowLimit: int, highLimit: int) -> int:

solution_test.py

import pytest

from solution import Solution


@pytest.mark.parametrize('lowLimit, highLimit, expected', [
    (1, 10, 2),
    (5, 15, 2),
    (19, 28, 2),
])
@pytest.mark.parametrize('sol', [Solution()])
def test_solution(sol, lowLimit, highLimit, expected):
    assert sol.countBalls(lowLimit, highLimit) == expected

Thoughts

跟 2342. Max Sum of a Pair With Equal Sum of Digits 类似，按 “sum of digits of the number” 把 [lowLimit, highLimit] 区间的所有数字分组，记录每组的数字个数，然后取最大即可。

一个小的优化是，对于连续的正整数，如果个位是从 0 到 9，则对应的 “sum of digits of the number” 也是连续递增的。利用这个规则可以节省 90% 左右的计算量。

时间复杂度 O(n)，空间复杂度 O(n)。

Code

solution.py

from collections import defaultdict


class Solution:
    def countBalls(self, lowLimit: int, highLimit: int) -> int:
        def sum_digits(num: int) -> int:
            s = 0
            while num > 0:
                s += num % 10
                num //= 10
            return s

        boxes: dict[int, int] = defaultdict(int) # box number -> number of balls
        box_num = sum_digits(lowLimit - 1)
        for num in range(lowLimit, highLimit + 1):
            if num % 10 == 0:
                box_num = sum_digits(num)
            else:
                box_num += 1

            boxes[box_num] += 1

        return max(boxes.values())