#3496 - Maximize Score After Pair Deletions

Medium • View on LeetCode • View on GitHub

Problem Description

You are given an array of integers nums. You must repeatedly perform one of the following operations while the array has more than two elements:

Remove the first two elements.
Remove the last two elements.
Remove the first and last element.

For each operation, add the sum of the removed elements to your total score.

Return the maximum possible score you can achieve.

Solution

/**
 * @param {number[]} nums
 * @return {number}
 */
var maxScore = function(nums) {
  const n = nums.length;
  const totalSum = nums.reduce((sum, num) => sum + num, 0);

  if (n % 2 === 1) {
    return totalSum - Math.min(...nums);
  } else {
    let minPairSum = Infinity;
    for (let i = 0; i < n - 1; i++) {
      minPairSum = Math.min(minPairSum, nums[i] + nums[i + 1]);
    }
    return totalSum - minPairSum;
  }
};