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Dhruv Badaya

A team of explorers is visiting the Sahara desert. Due to the extreme heat, they need to stay hydrated and have brought n bottles of different sizes to carry water. After travelling a few kilometre...

The question is: A team of explorers is visiting the Sahara desert. Due to the extreme heat, they need to stay hydrated and have brought n bottles of different sizes to carry water. After travelling a few kilometres, they run out of water but luckily find a water source. This water source has only L litres of water available, which is less than the combined capacity of all their bottles. They need to fill L litres of water using the minimum number of bottles. Describe a greedy algorithm to help them fill L litres of water using the minimum number of bottles.


So, we have to minimize the number of water bottles. We know that each bottle is of a different size. We can do this by filling the largest bottle first and the smallest last. Let us design a greedy strategy to do this.


  1. Sort the Bottles: Sort the array of bottle capacities in descending order.

  2. Initialize Counters:

  • Set a counter for the number of bottles used to zero.

  • Set a variable for the total amount of water collected to zero.

  1. Select Bottles:

  • Iterate through the sorted list of bottle capacities.

  • For each bottle:

  • Add its capacity to the total amount of water collected.

  • Increment the counter for the number of bottles used.

  • If the total amount of water collected is greater than or equal to L litres, stop the iteration.

  1. Check and Output:

  • If the total amount of water collected is at least L litres, output the number of bottles used.

  • If it's not possible to collect L litres after using all the bottles, indicate that it is not possible.

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