LeaderProduct | Topcoder Archive

Problem Statement

In a sales business, there is often some leader product that drives sales. In such a business, the total sales from one month to the next is often directly linked to the price of the leader product. The lower the price of the leader product, the higher the sales for the month. In this problem your task is to write a program to detect products with this property.

You will be given a String[], prices, each element of which represents the prices of a number of products for a given month. Each element of prices will contain N single-space delimited integers, where N is the number of products. The i^th integer in each element of prices represents the price of the i^th product for one month. You will also be given a int[], sales, each element of which represents the total sales for a month, where elements of sales and prices with corresponding indices represent the same month. You should find all products such that for every pair of months, if the price is lower one month than the other, the sales are higher in the month when the price is lower. You are to return a int[] sorted in ascending order, each element of which represents the index (starting from 0) of such a product.

Definition

Class:: LeaderProduct
Method:: getLeader
Parameters:: String[], int[]
Returns:: int[]
Method signature:: int[] getLeader(String[] prices, int[] sales)
(be sure your method is public)

Constraints

sales will contain between 2 and 50 elements, inclusive.
sales and prices will each contain the same number of elements.
Each element of prices will be formatted as a single-space delimited list of positive integers without leading zeros.
Each element of prices will contain the same number of integers.
Each element of prices will contain between 1 and 50 characters, inclusive.
Each element of sales will be between 0 and 1,000,000,000.
Each integer in prices will be between 1 and 1,000,000,000 (without the commas).

Examples

```
{"5 10 76 48","4 9 49 50","4 5 67 61"}
```
```
{184,305,1945}
```
```
Returns: { 0,  1 }
```
Product 0 is more expensive in month 0 than in months 1 and 2, and there are fewer sales in month 0 than in month 1 or month 2. Since the price of product 0 is the same in months 1 and 2, it doesn't matter which of them has the higher sales, so far as product 0 is concerned. The price of product 1 decreases from each month to the next, and the sales increase.
```
{"1 2 3 4","1 2 3 4","1 2 3 4","1 2 3 4"}
```
```
{46,354,38,53}
```
```
Returns: { 0,  1,  2,  3 }
```
The prices of the products are all constant. Therefore, it is trivially true that "for every pair of months, if the price is lower one month than the other, the sales are higher in the month when the price is lower."

{"79 144 75 94 29 78 100 67","45 136 59 93 52 44 86 64","92 959 34 60 61 80 39 67",
 "3 138 85 2 77 46 28 61","63 138 75 66 5 30 5 30","97 258 80 48 100 4 3 30",
 "93 138 40 45 25 39 63 83","60 977 67 38 73 23 27 53","71 138 58 100 38 75 46 75",
 "16 220 40 47 78 83 29 33","74 138 24 82 42 62 94 5","32 137 12 40 12 80 2 68",
 "94 137 90 77 51 40 93 10","60 138 92 95 21 65 8 95","79 137 3 37 85 5 83 59",
 "34 996 16 26 59 37 16 94","58 138 79 48 22 64 92 63","74 143 40 55 54 11 54 93",
 "4 970 94 98 38 9 15 54","52 137 11 91 50 17 57 43","23 138 90 64 45 81 69 42"}

{44,98,24,58,90,30,59,9,63,43,72,95,97,75,96,1,61,48,11,91,73}

Returns: { 1 }

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