Solution

Approach 1: Greedy

Intuition

If the smallest card a in A beats the smallest card b in B, we should pair them. Otherwise, a is useless for our score, as it can't beat any cards.

Why should we pair a and b if a > b? Because every card in A is larger than b, any card we place in front of b will score a point. We might as well use the weakest card to pair with b as it makes the rest of the cards in A strictly larger, and thus have more potential to score points.

Algorithm

We can use the above intuition to create a greedy approach. The current smallest card to beat in B will always be b = sortedB[j]. For each card a in sortedA, we will either have a beat that card b (put a into assigned[b]), or throw a out (put a into remaining).

Afterwards, we can use our annotations assigned and remaining to reconstruct the answer. Please see the comments for more details.

Complexity Analysis

• Time Complexity: , where is the length of A and B.

• Space Complexity: .

Analysis written by: @awice.