Question

You decided that you would give a shot at riding a unicycle while
balancing weights on both your hands. To make sure that you don’t
fall, you want the weights in your hands to balance out as much as
possible (i.e. the difference between the sum of the weights in either
of your hands must be as small as possible). Given the weights you
have, determine the smallest difference in weight between your left
and right hands.

Sample Input: 1 10 6

Sample Output: 3

Also, you don’t have to use all the weights, but you can’t use 0 weights. I’m thinking that a recursive function would be the best way to solve this.

By the way, this isn’t my homework or anything, it’s a question on a past Dwite contest.

Answer 1

My PHP is a little rusty, but something like this should work:

$left = 0; $right = 0;
for_each($input as $value) {
  if ($left < $right) {
    $left += $value;
  } else {
    $right += $value;
  }
}
$answer = abs( $left - $right );