The Hurdle Race in Javascript

by Travis Scott Lee

Problem

A video player plays a game in which the character competes in a hurdle race. Hurdles are of varying heights, and the characters have a maximum height they can jump. There is a magic potion they can take that will increase their maximum jump height by 1 unit for each dose. How many doses of the potion must the character take to be able to jump all of the hurdles. If the character can already clear all of the hurdles, return .

Example

height = [1,2,3,3,2]

k = 1

The character can jump 1 unit high initially and must take 3–1= 2 doses of potion to be able to jump all of the hurdles.

Function Description

Complete the hurdleRace function in the editor below.

hurdleRace has the following parameter(s):

• int k: the height the character can jump naturally
• int height[n]: the heights of each hurdle

Returns

• int: the minimum number of doses required, always 0 or more

Input Format

The first line contains two space-separated integers n and k, the number of hurdles and the maximum height the character can jump naturally.
The second line contains n space-separated integers height[i] where 0 ≤ i < n.

Constraints

• 1 ≤ n,k ≤ 100
• 1 ≤ height[i] ≤ 100

Solution

First, we set the variable maxHeight to biggest number in the array and result to 0. The Math.max() function will find the biggest number in the data pool you give it. Then, if the max height the player could jump is greater than the maxHeight, we return the result is 0 because they do not need to drink the potions. On the other hand, we return the result as maxHeight — k to represent the number of potions the player needs to drink in order to the jump the hurdle.