In this practice challenge, you will get an opportunity to use the Data Structures and Algorithms skills you have built over the course of the program. It will also help you prepare for the types of challenges you can expect to see in job interviews.
You are a restaurant manager at the hottest new burrito spot in town, Spicy Beans, and because of overwhelming demand, have had to hire a new cook to help cook the beans for the burritos. Unfortunately, the new cook didn't read the recipe correctly and just took your restaurant's name in to consideration when they started cooking, making every batch of beans they made way to spicy!
Suppose you have n batches of beans [1, 2, 3, ..., n] and you want to find out
which was the first spicy one, so that you can put a warning label on all the
subsequent batches.
You are given a method that returns a boolean, #is_spicy_batch(batch) which
returns whether a batch is spicy. Implement a method, #first_spicy_batch, to
find the first spicy batch. You should minimize the number of calls to the given
method.
Examples:
# Input: n = 11, spicy = 3
# Output: 4
is_spicy_batch(6) # => true
is_spicy_batch(3) # => true
is_spicy_batch(2) # => false
# Batch 3 is the first spicy batch.# Input: n = 1, spicy = 1
# Output: 1
is_spicy_batch(1) # => true
# Batch 1 is the first spicy batch.Remember the process:
- Rewrite the problem in your own words
- Write your own test cases
- Pseudocode
- Code
- Refactor to make it clean and readable
- Refactor to optimize
Once you have a complete solution, run the test suite using learn test as a
final check.
Several possible approaches for completing this challenge are provided in a separate lesson. Once your code is working and you have all the tests passing, be sure to take a look at the example solutions provided. This will give you exposure to different approaches for solving this challenge, and may also give you ideas for how you might want to refactor your code to make it better.