Feature #6: Find Two Sets of Consecutive Days

Description

An enterprise partner has asked us to create a feature for them. They want us to find two sets of consecutive days to schedule board meetings. They are selecting members for two teams from a candidate pool. Selecting each team takes k hours. We want to schedule two sets of meetings, one for each team, of duration k hours each. To ensure fairness, we want the selection committee meetings for a specific team to be done on consecutive days. This means that, once the interviews for a specific team start, there should be meetings every day until the interviews are over. The interviews for the second team cannot start on the last day of selections for the first team; they do not necessarily need to start the very next day, either. To best utilize everyone’s time, we want to fully utilize the mutually free hours on each day meetings are scheduled. We have already found the number of mutually free hours over a set of consecutive days for the members of the selection committee. Furthermore, we want each selection meeting to last as few days as possible. Our task is to find two sets of consecutive days for these selection board meetings that fulfill the above criteria and return the total number of days needed for the meetings.

For example, consider that the number of mutually free hours over a set of consecutive days are [1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6, 7, 2, 1, 4, 8], and k is 5. In this case, the possible set of days with k free hours are [1, 2, 2], [3, 2], and [1, 4]. The requirements said that we want to select the sets that span the fewest days, so those are: [3, 2] and [1, 4]. Our function should return the total days that will be needed for both sets of meetings. Therefore, the output will be 4 for this example.