Simulate meeting-room bookings and return busiest room

Q: Simulate meeting-room bookings and return busiest room

This question evaluates a candidate's competence in scheduling and resource-allocation algorithms, focusing on simulation of interval-based bookings, tie-breaking logic, and tracking per-resource assignment counts.

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Question

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You manage n meeting rooms labeled 0..n-1 and receive a list of meetings. Each meeting is an interval [start, end) with start < end.

Process meetings in increasing order of start time (if not already sorted).

Room assignment rules

If one or more rooms are free at the meeting’s start , assign the meeting to the free room with the smallest room id .
If no room is free at start , the meeting is delayed until the earliest time when some room becomes free. It must keep the same duration duration = end - start , and it is assigned to the room that becomes free earliest (break ties by smallest room id).
When a delayed meeting starts at time t , it ends at t + duration .

Let count[i] be the number of meetings assigned to room i. Return the room id with the maximum count[i]. If there is a tie, return the smallest room id among the tied rooms.

Input

n : integer
meetings : list of pairs [start, end)

Output

integer room id

Constraints (typical for this problem)

1 ≤ n ≤ 10^5
1 ≤ len(meetings) ≤ 2*10^5
times fit in 32-bit integers; delayed times may exceed original end times

Notes

You should aim for an efficient solution (e.g., using priority queues / heaps).

Simulate meeting-room bookings and return busiest room

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