Breaking the Records: Hackerrank challenge.

In this blog post, I will share with you how I approached solving the hackerrank algorithms breaking the records challenge.

The Problem

Maria plays college basketball and wants to go pro. Each season she maintains a record of her play. She tabulates the number of times she breaks her season record for most points and least points in a game. Points scored in the first game establish her record for the season, and she begins counting from there.

Example

Scores are in the same order as the games played. She tabulates her results as follows:

Count
    Game  Score  Minimum  Maximum   Min Max
     0      12     12       12       0   0
     1      24     12       24       0   1
     2      10     10       24       1   1
     3      24     10       24       1   1

Given the scores for a season, determine the number of times Maria breaks her records for most and least points scored during the season.

Function Description

Complete the breakingRecords function in the editor below.

breakingRecords has the following parameter(s):

• int scores[n]: points scored per game

Returns

• int[2]: An array with the numbers of times she broke her records. Index is for breaking most points records, and index is for breaking least points records.

Input Format

The first line contains an integer , the number of games.
The second line contains space-separated integers describing the respective values of .

Constraints

Sample Input 0

9
10 5 20 20 4 5 2 25 1

Sample Output 0

2 4

Explanation 0

The diagram below depicts the number of times Maria broke her best and worst records throughout the season:

She broke her best record twice (after games and ) and her worst record four times (after games , , , and ), so we print 2 4 as our answer. Note that she did not break her record for best score during game , as her score during that game was not strictly greater than her best record at the time.

Sample Input 1

10
3 4 21 36 10 28 35 5 24 42

Sample Output 1

4 0

Explanation 1

The diagram below depicts the number of times Maria broke her best and worst records throughout the season:

She broke her best record four times (after games , , , and ) and her worst record zero times (no score during the season was lower than the one she earned during her first game), so we print 4 0 as our answer.

The solution

First of all, before jumping into the cord let’s write a step-by-step on how we are going to solve the challenge(The algorithm), Initially, I used a pen and paper her it is advised to do so to bring your mind into much focus.

This program is going to see how much lower score(min) and higher score(max) the player has scored over the course of the season.

Step 1: First initialize the higher score and the lower score to equal the first game score. Also, initialize the min and max count to equal zero(0)

let higherScore = score[0];
let lowerScore = score[0];
let min = 0;
let max = 0;

Step 2: loop through the array of scores, check if a score is greater than the highest score assign that scores to the highest score, and increment the max counter else if the score is less than the lower score, assign the score o the lower score variable and increment the mix score counter

if(score[i] > higherScore){
     higheScore = score[i];
     max = max + 1;
}else if(score[i] < lowerScore){
    lowerScore = score[i];
    min = min + 1;
}

Step 3: Return an array of max and min counts

return [max, min]

In summary, this can be done as follows

function breakingRecords(scores) {
let highestScore = scores[0];
let lowestScore = scores[0];
let min = 0;
let max = 0;
for(let i = 0;i < scores.length; i++ ){
 if(scores[i] > highestScore){
     highestScore = scores[i]
     max = max + 1;
  } else if(scores[i] < lowestScore){
     
    lowestScore = scores[i]
    min = min + 1
  }
}
  return [max,min]
}

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/5vh4crJBztg