Decode the Coding Interview in Java: Real-World Examples/

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Feature #11: Generate Movie Viewing Orders

Feature #11: Generate Movie Viewing Orders

Implementing the "Generate Movie Viewing Orders" feature for our "Netflix" project.

We'll cover the following...

Description

We want to offer marathons for our viewers. Each marathon will have a fixed set of movies catering to a specific taste. For a given marathon, different viewing orders of the movies will yield different user satisfaction results. We want to experiment (A/B testing) with different viewing orders of the same marathon.

Your task is to generate all the possible permutations of movies in a given marathon.

Let’s look at an example to better understand this:

Solution

To solve this problem, we will use the backtracking approach.

We will assume a backtrack function that takes the index of the first movie to consider as one of the arguments.

  • If the first movie to consider has index size, then that means that the current permutation is done.

  • We will iterate over the marathon from index first to index size - 1.

  • We will place the ith movie first in the permutation, that is, moviesList[first], moviesList[i] = moviesList[i], moviesList[first].

  • We will proceed to create all the permutations that start from the ith movie: backtrack(first + 1).

  • Now we will backtrack, that is, moviesList[first], moviesList[i] = moviesList[i], moviesList[first] back.

Let’s look at some illustrations to better understand this:

Note: We are using numbers to represent movies in the following illustration.

Let’s look at the code for this solution:

class Solution{
  public static void backTrack(int first, int size, List<String> moviesList, List<List<String>> output) {
    // If all strings of given array `moviesList` are used and 
    // and Backtracking is performed add the permutations to output array.
    if (first == size) {
      List<String> temp = new ArrayList<String>(moviesList);
      output.add(temp);
    }
    // Perform Backtracking for the size of a given array.
    for (int i = first; i < size; i++) {
      
      // Swap: In the current permutation place i-th integer first.
      Collections.swap(moviesList, first, i);
      
      // Complete permutations using the next integers.
      backTrack(first + 1, size, moviesList, output);
      
      // Swap and Backtrack
      Collections.swap(moviesList, first, i);
    }
  }
  public static List<List<String>> generatePermutations(String[] movies) {
    List<List<String>> output = new LinkedList<>();
    int size = movies.length;
    // convert movies into list since the output is a list of lists
    ArrayList<String> moviesList = new ArrayList<String>();
    for (String movie : movies)
      moviesList.add(movie);
    backTrack(0, size, moviesList, output);
    return output;
  }
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    // Example #1
    String[] input = {"Frozen","Dune","Coco"};
    List<List<String>> output = generatePermutations(input);
    System.out.println("Output 1: " + output);
    // Example #2
    String[] input2 = {"Frozen","Dune","Coco","Melificient"};
    output = generatePermutations(input2);
    System.out.println("Output 2: " + output);
    // Example #3
    String[] input3 = {"Dune","Coco"};
    output = generatePermutations(input3);
    System.out.println("Output 3: " + output);
  }
}
Generate movie viewing orders

Complexity measures

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