Surname | Topcoder Archive

Problem Statement

At the carnival this year, there is a contest to determine the best surname. One lucky winner will receive a prize. Each surname is assigned a score which is the sum of the ASCII values of all its characters. You will be given a String[] surnames, where each element contains only uppercase letters ('A'-'Z'). Return the 0-based index of the surname in surnames with the highest score. In case of a tie, return the one with the lowest index.

The ASCII values for uppercase letters are 'A' = 65, 'B' = 66, ..., 'Z' = 90 (which are the integer values of the characters).

Definition

Class:: Surname
Method:: bestSurname
Parameters:: String[]
Returns:: int
Method signature:: int bestSurname(String[] surnames)
(be sure your method is public)

Constraints

surnames will contain between 1 and 10 elements, inclusive.
Each element of surnames will contain between 1 and 20 characters, inclusive.
surnames will contain only uppercase letters ('A'-'Z').

Examples

```
{"JONES", "WILLIAMS", "SMITH", "HARPER"}
```
```
Returns: 1
```
The values assigned to these strings are as follows: JONES = 74 + 79 + 78 + 69 + 83 = 383 WILLIAMS = 87 + 73 + 76 + 76 + 73 + 65 + 77 + 83 = 610 SMITH = 83 + 77 + 73 + 84 + 72 = 389 HARPER = 72 + 65 + 82 + 80 + 69 + 82 = 450 WILLIAMS is assigned the highest score and its index is returned.

{"JOHNSON", "CHU", "LOPEZ", "SCAFFIDI", "PASQUALE", "KRUMME"}

Returns: 4

```
{"ABA", "BAA", "CAB", "BAC"}
```
```
Returns: 2
```
"CAB" and "BAC" have the same ASCII sum. "CAB" is chosen because it has the lower index.

{"BOHR", "FRANKLIN", "TESLA", "NEWTON", "EDISON", "FARNSWORTH", "GUTENBERG", "HOOVER", "MARCONI", "EINSTEIN"}

Returns: 5

{"BABBAGE", "BOOLE", "BRESENHAM", "TURING", "DIJKSTRA", "BACKUS", "FLOYD", "KERNIGHAN", "BOOCH", "NEUMANN"}

Returns: 7

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