Basketball One-on-One

Question

https://open.kattis.com/problems/basketballoneononeopen.kattis.com

Solution

Idea

To solve this question trivially, you can

1. Iterate through the input and record the score for A and score for B

2. And after exiting the loop, check whose score is higher

I haven't tried this solution so I am not sure whether it will work or not. But this solution is not elegant! And the more elegant or faster way is to add the following steps to our original solution:

1. If score_a >= 11 && score_a - score_b >= 2, that means A wins, print the result, return.

2. If score_b >= 11 && score_b - score_a >= 2, that means B wins, print the result, return.

Note that steps 3 and 4 are not in if/else relation, that means you need to use two if to judge.

Code

https://github.com/mendax1234/Coding-Problems/blob/main/kattis/basketballoneonone/basketballoneonone.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

#define MAX_LEN 200

int main()
{
  char line[MAX_LEN];

  if (fgets(line, MAX_LEN, stdin))
  {
    line[strcspn(line, "\n")] = 0;
  }
  
  long score1 = 0;
  long score2 = 0;
  for (long i = 0; line[i] != 0; i += 2)
  {
    if (line[i] == 'A')
    {
      score1 += (long)line[i+1] - (long)'0';
    }
    else
    {
      score2 += (long)line[i+1] - (long)'0';
    }
    if (score1 >= 11 && score1 - score2 >= 2)
    {
      printf("A\n");
      return 0;
    }
    if (score2 >= 11 && score2 - score1 >= 2)
    {
      printf("B\n");
      return 0;
    }
  }
}