Relative Ranks - Problem
🏃♂️ Olympic Competition Ranking System
You're tasked with implementing a ranking system for an Olympic competition! Given an array of athlete scores, you need to determine each athlete's rank and assign appropriate awards.
Here's how the ranking works:
- 🥇 1st place (highest score):
"Gold Medal" - 🥈 2nd place:
"Silver Medal" - 🥉 3rd place:
"Bronze Medal" - 🏃 4th place and beyond: Their numeric rank as a string (e.g.,
"4","5", etc.)
Input: An integer array score where score[i] represents the score of the i-th athlete. All scores are guaranteed to be unique.
Output: An array answer where answer[i] is the rank/award of the i-th athlete.
Example: If scores are [10, 3, 8, 9, 4], the rankings would be: Gold Medal (10), 5th place (3), Bronze Medal (8), Silver Medal (9), 4th place (4).
Input & Output
example_1.py — Standard Olympic Competition
$
Input:
[5, 4, 3, 2, 1]
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Output:
["Gold Medal", "Silver Medal", "Bronze Medal", "4", "5"]
💡 Note:
The scores in descending order are [5, 4, 3, 2, 1]. So athlete with score 5 gets Gold Medal (1st), score 4 gets Silver Medal (2nd), score 3 gets Bronze Medal (3rd), score 2 gets rank "4", and score 1 gets rank "5".
example_2.py — Mixed Score Order
$
Input:
[10, 3, 8, 9, 4]
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Output:
["Gold Medal", "5", "Bronze Medal", "Silver Medal", "4"]
💡 Note:
Sorted scores: [10, 9, 8, 4, 3]. Athlete 0 (score 10) gets Gold Medal, athlete 1 (score 3) gets rank "5", athlete 2 (score 8) gets Bronze Medal, athlete 3 (score 9) gets Silver Medal, athlete 4 (score 4) gets rank "4".
example_3.py — Minimum Case
$
Input:
[1]
›
Output:
["Gold Medal"]
💡 Note:
With only one athlete, they automatically get the Gold Medal regardless of their score.
Constraints
- n == score.length
- 1 ≤ n ≤ 104
- 0 ≤ score[i] ≤ 106
- All the scores are guaranteed to be unique
Visualization
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Understanding the Visualization
1
Athletes Line Up
Athletes are in their original positions with their scores
2
Performance Ranking
Sort all scores to determine who gets which medal/rank
3
Create Scoreboard
Build a lookup table mapping each score to its award
4
Award Ceremony
Announce each athlete's award in their original order
Key Takeaway
🎯 Key Insight: Sort once to establish rankings, then use hash map for O(1) lookups - much better than O(n²) repeated comparisons!
💡
Explanation
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// Output will appear here after running code