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#2073 - Time Needed to Buy Tickets

Problem Description

There are n people in a line queuing to buy tickets, where the 0th person is at the front of the line and the (n - 1)th person is at the back of the line.

You are given a 0-indexed integer array tickets of length n where the number of tickets that the ith person would like to buy is tickets[i].

Each person takes exactly 1 second to buy a ticket. A person can only buy 1 ticket at a time and has to go back to the end of the line (which happens instantaneously) in order to buy more tickets. If a person does not have any tickets left to buy, the person will leave the line.

Return the time taken for the person initially at position k (0-indexed) to finish buying tickets.

Solution

/**
 * @param {number[]} tickets
 * @param {number} k
 * @return {number}
 */
var timeRequiredToBuy = function(tickets, k) {
  const target = tickets[k];
  let result = 0;

  for (let i = 0; i < tickets.length; i++) {
    if (i <= k) {
      result += Math.min(tickets[i], target);
    } else {
      result += Math.min(tickets[i], target - 1);
    }
  }

  return result;
};