Parity Alternated Deletions Coding Question-Codeforces rated 900

Placewit
3 min readJan 28, 2022

Problem Statement :

Polycarp has an array a consisting of n integers.

He wants to play a game with this array. The game consists of several moves. On the first move, he chooses any element and deletes it (after the first move the array contains n−1 elements). For each of the next moves he chooses any element with the only restriction: its parity should differ from the parity of the element deleted on the previous move. In other words, he alternates parities (even-odd-even-odd-… or odd-even-odd-even-…) of the removed elements. Polycarp stops if he can’t make a move.

Formally:

If it is the first move, he chooses any element and deletes it;

If it is the second or any next move:

if the last deleted element was odd, Polycarp chooses any even element and deletes it;

if the last deleted element was even, Polycarp chooses any odd element and deletes it.

If after some move Polycarp cannot make a move, the game ends.

Polycarp’s goal is to minimize the sum of non-deleted elements of the array after the end of the game. If Polycarp can delete the whole array, then the sum of non-deleted elements is zero.

Help Polycarp find this value.

Input Format:

The first line of the input contains one integer n (1≤n≤20001≤n≤2000) — the number of elements of aa.

The second line of the input contains n integers a1,a2,…,ana1,a2,…,an (0≤ai≤1060≤ai≤106), where ai is the i-th element of a.

Output Format:

Print one integer — the minimum possible sum of non-deleted elements of the array after the end of the game.

Given:

5
1 5 7 8 2

Output:

0

Explanation of given Test Cases :

Here the minimum case occurs when anyone odd number is deleted and then repeating the process all the elements of the array are deleted.

Code:

Thanks for Reading

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