Program to check whether first player win in candy remove game or not in Python?

Suppose we have a list of numbers called candies and someone is playing a game against his/her friend. In each round, a player can remove any two consecutive candies with the same value. And whoever can not pick up a candy loses and that player1 start first, we have to check whether player1 will win or not.

So, if the input is like nums = [2, 2, 5], then the output will be True, as if player1 picks the 2s then the other player cannot pick any candies.

To solve this, we will follow these steps:

• stack := a new stack

• turns := 0

• for each num in nums, do

  • if stack is not empty and top of stack is same as num, then

    • pop from stack

    • turns := turns + 1

  • otherwise,

    • push num into stack

• return true when turns is odd otherwise false

Example

 Live Demo

class Solution:
   def solve(self, nums):
      stack = []
      turns = 0
      for num in nums:
         if stack and stack[-1] == num:
            stack.pop()
            turns += 1
         else:
            stack.append(num)

      return bool(turns & 1)

ob = Solution()
nums = [2, 2, 5]
print(ob.solve(nums))

Input

[2, 2, 5]

Output

True

Arnab Chakraborty

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Updated on: 10-Nov-2020

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