Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array
A medium-tier problem at 36% community acceptance, tagged with Math, Greedy. Reported in interviews at Infosys and 0 others.
Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array is a medium-difficulty problem that's shown up in Infosys interviews. With a 36% acceptance rate, it's filtering out candidates who can't recognize the greedy pattern. The problem forces you to think about optimization in a non-obvious way. Most people approach it wrong on first sight and burn time backtracking. If this lands in your OA and the greedy insight doesn't click immediately, StealthCoder surfaces the working solution invisibly during your screen share, no proctor awareness.
Companies that ask "Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array"
Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Built because the OA filter rejects engineers who'd pass the on-site. That's a broken filter. This is the workaround.
Get StealthCoderThe core trick here is recognizing that a greedy approach yields the minimum sum, not a brute-force or dynamic search. Candidates often try to construct the array manually or use recursion to explore all possibilities, which crushes performance. The math insight is that you want to pair or combine elements in a specific order to minimize the final sum. Once you see the pattern, the code is short. The pitfall: spending 20 minutes on a simulation that fails edge cases. If you're halfway through your OA, stuck on this, and the greedy approach hasn't crystallized, StealthCoder gives you a tested implementation in seconds so you move to the next problem.
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Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Built because the OA filter rejects engineers who'd pass the on-site. That's a broken filter. This is the workaround. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array interview FAQ
Is this problem really that hard?+
The 36% acceptance rate suggests most people miss the greedy pattern on first attempt. It's not algorithmically complex, but it punishes wrong intuition. The trick is recognizing what 'beautiful' actually enforces and how that constrains your choices. Study the definition carefully before jumping to code.
Do I need advanced data structures?+
No. The optimal solution relies on math and greedy logic, not hash maps or heaps. You might use sorting or a priority queue depending on implementation, but they're not the core insight. Overengineering here is a trap.
How does this relate to greedy algorithms?+
Classic greedy setup: at each step, pick the locally optimal choice (usually pairing smallest elements or eliminating in a specific order) and prove it leads to the global minimum. If your greedy choice doesn't hold up on all test cases, you've misidentified the invariant.
Is this still asked at Infosys?+
It's in the reported problem set for Infosys. LeetCode-style assessment problems rotate, but medium-difficulty greedy problems remain staple interview content. If you're prepping for Infosys online assessments, understanding the pattern is worth an hour of study.
What's the biggest pitfall?+
Trying to simulate or brute-force all possible beautiful arrays instead of identifying the greedy rule that produces the minimum directly. You'll TLE or fail edge cases. Work backwards: assume the answer is optimal, then derive what choices must have been made to get there.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Find the Minimum Possible Sum of a Beautiful Array" on LeetCode →