Solution: Rearranging Fruits

Statement

Given two 0-indexed integer arrays, basket1 and basket2, representing the cost of each fruit in the basket. Each basket contains $n$ fruits. Make the two baskets identical, i.e., both arrays should have the same weights.

To achieve this, perform the following operation as many times as necessary:

1. Select two indexes, $i$ and $j$, and swap the fruit at index $i$ in basket1 with the fruit at index $j$ in basket2.

2. The cost of this swap is min(basket1[i], basket2[j]).

The two baskets are considered identical if, after sorting the fruits by cost, both baskets contain exactly the same costs.

Return the minimum cost required to make the baskets identical, or $-1$ if it is impossible.

Constraints:

• basket1.length $=$ basket2.length

• $1 \leq$ basket1.length $\leq 10^3$

• $1 \leq$ basket1[i], basket2[i] $\leq 10^4$

Solution

The idea behind this problem is to ensure that both baskets, basket1 and basket2, contain the same number of each type of fruit. A simple approach can be to just swap the excess elements from both baskets until both baskets have the same number of occurrences of those elements.

Here’s how the approach will work: