4 articles
Find the minimum cost to connect all sticks by always merging the two shortest first — a direct application of the Huffman coding greedy principle, asked at Amazon and Facebook as a clean demonstration of optimal merge order.
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.
Answer range-coverage queries offline by sorting both intervals and queries, sweeping through with a min-heap ordered by interval size — a canonical offline query pattern.
Design a seat manager that always reserves the lowest available seat number and supports unreservation using a min-heap — the canonical example of heap-based resource management.