Letter Candles
Reported by candidates from Intuit's online assessment. Pattern, common pitfall, and the honest play if you blank under the timer.
Intuit's Letter Candles question hit the OA circuit in February 2024 and it's a pattern-matching problem disguised as a string manipulation task. You're likely given a set of candles, each labeled with a letter, and you need to figure out which letters you can spell or match based on inventory constraints. The trick is not overthinking the simulation. It's a counting problem wrapped in narrative flavor. StealthCoder will catch the off-by-one errors you'd normally make under live pressure.
Pattern and pitfall
This is fundamentally a hash-table or counting problem. You build a frequency map of available letters, then iterate through a target word (or sequence) and check whether you have enough of each letter to satisfy the requirement. The common pitfall is forgetting to decrement your count after each use, or mishandling edge cases where you have zero of a required letter. The pattern is straightforward: count, check, consume. The live OA pressure makes you second-guess the simplicity. StealthCoder sits silent in the corner and lets you see the solution pattern instantly if you blank on the logic flow.
Memorize the pattern. If you can't, run StealthCoder. The proctor sees the IDE. They don't see what's behind it.
You can drill Letter Candles cold, or you can hedge it. StealthCoder runs invisibly during screen share and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. The proctor sees the IDE. They don't see what's behind it. Made by an engineer who treats the OA as theater. If yours is tonight, you don't have time to grind. You have time to hedge.
Get StealthCoderRelated leaked OAs
This OA pattern shows up on LeetCode as valid anagram. If you have time before the OA, drill that.
You've seen the question.
Make sure you actually pass Intuit's OA.
Intuit reuses patterns across OAs. Made by an engineer who treats the OA as theater. If yours is tonight, you don't have time to grind. You have time to hedge. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Letter Candles FAQ
Is this a hard problem or medium difficulty?+
Medium at worst. It's not a DP problem or graph problem. It's a single-pass counting problem. The difficulty spike comes from misreading the problem statement or over-engineering. Read once, code straightforward.
What's the trick I'm missing?+
There usually isn't one. Build a frequency map of letters. Iterate through the target. Decrement counts as you go. Check for zero or negative. That's it. Intuit likes clean, readable solutions.
Do I need to sort anything or use a fancy data structure?+
No. A dictionary or hash map is all you need. Sorting would be a red herring. If you catch yourself reaching for a heap or tree, you've gone wrong.
Can I solve this in Python without external libraries?+
Absolutely. collections.Counter makes it one-liner-adjacent, but a plain dict with get() or defaultdict works fine. Intuit doesn't care which. Pick what you code fastest in.
How do I prepare for this in 48 hours if I've never seen it?+
Do three or four easy string and counting problems on LeetCode. Valid Anagram and Ransom Note are perfect warm-ups. Then get comfortable with your language's dict/map idioms. That's the floor.