1582 articles
Reach the furthest building by greedily assigning ladders to the largest climbs and bricks to the rest — a nuanced greedy problem with a min-heap that appears at Amazon, Facebook, and Google and teaches optimal resource allocation under uncertainty.
LeetCode 1882 Process Tasks Using Servers is a Google and Amazon two-heap scheduling interview classic. Master the priority queue approach that simulates task assignment in O((m+n) log n).
LeetCode 407 Trapping Rain Water II is a Google and Meta hard interview problem. Solve it with min-heap BFS that processes the elevation map inward from the border in O(mn log(mn)).
LeetCode 778 Swim in Rising Water is a Google and Amazon hard problem disguised as Dijkstra. Solve it with a min-heap that minimizes the maximum elevation along any path in O(N^2 log N).
LeetCode 632 Smallest Range Covering Elements from K Lists is a Google and Meta hard interview problem. Solve it with a K-way merge min-heap that maintains a sliding range across K sorted lists in O(N log K).