花花酱 1054. Distant Barcodes

In a warehouse, there is a row of barcodes, where the i-th barcode is barcodes[i].

Rearrange the barcodes so that no two adjacent barcodes are equal.  You may return any answer, and it is guaranteed an answer exists.

Example 1:

Input: [1,1,1,2,2,2]
Output: [2,1,2,1,2,1]

Example 2:

Input: [1,1,1,1,2,2,3,3]
Output: [1,3,1,3,2,1,2,1]

Note:

1. 1 <= barcodes.length <= 10000
2. 1 <= barcodes[i] <= 10000

Soluton: Sorting

Sort the element by their frequency in descending order. Fill the most frequent element first in even positions, if reach the end of the array, start from position 1 then 3, 5, …

Time complexity: O(nlogn)
Space complexity: O(n)

Solution 2: Find the most frequent

Actually, we only need to find the most frequent element and put in the even positions, then put the rest of the groups of elements in any order.

e.g. [1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4]
Can be
5*2 [2 – 2 – 2 – 2 – 2]
4*1 [2 4 2 – 2 – 2 – 2]
3*1 [2 4 2 3 2 – 2 – 2]
1*2 [ 2 3 2 3 2 1 2 1 2]

if we start with any other groups rather than 2, if will become:
[3 2 2 – 2 – 2 – 2 ] which is wrong…

Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(n)