haha, there are way too many days where I end up with code that works with the sample but fails the real input. its just not really possible to expect the sample and description to properly prepare you. oh well, it is what it is.
Good, although it took some time. Actually, I got my personal best global rank on that problem.
Haha, I spent about two hours fiddling about in the debugger and drawing bad diagrams to get an answer. I just checked and it turns out that I also got my personal best ranking on it too, though I’m not sure it should count :-)
That just makes sense – the top-1k are competitive programmers, and today’s puzzle had nothing to do with competitive programming :)
True, I’ve just been looking at the comments on the other place, and pretty much everyone there seems to have resorted to figuring it out manually too.
If it had been more than 4 swaps, or larger distance swaps, this could have been a nightmare challenge.