My JPMorgan OA has been successfully ACed!
Both questions this time are relatively conventional, mainly testing logical reasoning and DP thinking, with no tricky parts.
The overall difficulty is below medium—if you stay clear-headed and careful with details, you can definitely pass it in one go.
Question 1: Balance the Number of Items in Two Parts
Problem
Divide a list of items into two parts (prefix and suffix).
By incrementing or decrementing item counts, make the total counts of the two parts equal.
Find the minimum number of operations required.
Thought Process
This question obviously calls for a prefix sum approach.
Scan the array from the start and enumerate each split point.
Both the sum of the left part and the sum of the right part can be directly calculated using the prefix sum.
The difference is
diff = abs(sum_left - sum_right)
Each operation changes the difference between the two sides by 2,
so the minimum number of operations needed is diff / 2 (rounded up if the difference is odd).
The final answer is the minimum min_ops among all split points.
Time Complexity
O(n)
Notes
Watch out for the odd difference case — some test cases require rounding up.
Question 2: Maximum Security Value of Jump Attacks
Problem
A hacker starts attacking from some server.
Each time, the attack jumps k nodes forward until it leaves the network.
Find the maximum total security value of servers that can be attacked,
over all possible starting positions.
Thought Process
This question is a classic DP problem.
Define
dp[i] = security[i] + (dp[i+k] if i+k < n else 0)
We scan from right to left.
The final answer is the maximum dp[i] over all indices.
Time Complexity
O(n) — can be done with a single reverse pass.
Optimization Tip
If k is particularly large (e.g., larger than n),
just take the maximum single-point value directly.
Summary
Overall, JPM’s OA this time is quite friendly and not too challenging.
The first question uses prefix sum + split point enumeration,
and the second is a standard DP problem — no difficulty once you recognize the pattern.
If you’ve practiced LeetCode-style prefix sum / jumping / DP problems,
you can almost solve these immediately.
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