PROBLEM LINK:
Practice
Contest: Division 1
Contest: Division 2
Contest: Division 3
Contest: Division 4
Author: iceknight1093
Tester: sushil2006
Editorialist: iceknight1093
DIFFICULTY:
Cakewalk
PREREQUISITES:
None
PROBLEM:
You have L left shoes and R right shoes.
Each left shoe can be paired with one right shoe.
What’s the minimum number of unpaired shoes you can be left with?
EXPLANATION:
Each left shoe is to be paired with one right shoe.
So,
- If L \leq R, every left shoe can be paired up.
This will leave R-L unpaired right shoes. - If L \geq R, the opposite is true: every right shoe can be paired up.
This will leave L-R unpaired left shoes.
Thus, the answer is either R-L or L-R, depending on whether L \leq R or not.
A simpler formulation is to note that in either case, the answer is just the difference between L and R, i.e.
|L-R|
In most languages, this translates to abs(L-R).
TIME COMPLEXITY:
\mathcal{O}(1) per testcase.
CODE:
Editorialist's code (PyPy3)
l, r = map(int, input().split())
print(abs(l-r))