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Minimum Operations

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This post is part of the Algorithms Problem Solving series.

Problem description

This is the Minimum Operations problem. The description looks like this:

You are given an integer array nums (0-indexed). In one operation, you can choose an element of the array and increment it by 1.

Return the minimum number of operations needed to make nums *strictly increasing.*

An array nums is strictly increasing if nums[i] < nums[i+1] for all 0 <= i < nums.length - 1. An array of length 1 is trivially strictly increasing.

Examples

Example 1:

Input: nums = [1,1,1]
Output: 3
Explanation: You can do the following operations:
1) Increment nums[2], so nums becomes [1,1,2].
2) Increment nums[1], so nums becomes [1,2,2].
3) Increment nums[2], so nums becomes [1,2,3].

Example 2:

Input: nums = [1,5,2,4,1]
Output: 14

Example 3:

Input: nums = [8]
Output: 0

Solution

First solution counting and update the array in place.

def min_operations(nums):
    previous_num = nums[0]
    operations = 0

    for index, num in enumerate(nums[1:]):
        if num <= previous_num:
            new_num = previous_num - num + 1
            operations += new_num
            nums[index + 1] += new_num

        previous_num = nums[index + 1]

    return operations

Second and more optimized solution without the need to update the array.

def min_operations(nums):
    prev, ops = 0, 0

    for num in nums:
        if num <= prev:
            prev += 1
            ops += prev - num
        else:
            prev = num

    return ops

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