Distribute Candies Among Children II
A medium-tier problem at 56% community acceptance, tagged with Math, Combinatorics, Enumeration. Reported in interviews at ZS Associates and 2 others.
Distribute Candies Among Children II is a medium-difficulty combinatorics problem that shows up in Amazon assessments and is asked by ZS Associates and Rubrik. If you're drilling math problems before your OA and skip enumeration patterns, this is the one that bites you. The problem forces you past the obvious counting approach into the space where you have to think about constraints and distributions systematically. With a 56% acceptance rate, it's neither a gimme nor a crusher, but it's the kind of problem where the right mental model takes 30 seconds and the wrong one takes 30 minutes. If you hit it live and your first instinct doesn't land, StealthCoder solves it invisibly in seconds.
Companies that ask "Distribute Candies Among Children II"
Distribute Candies Among Children II 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. Made for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him.
Get StealthCoderThe trap is treating this as a straightforward 'pick and place' problem when it's really asking you to enumerate valid distributions under specific constraints. You need combinatorics, not just arithmetic. The problem rewards candidates who recognize which enumeration pattern applies and avoid the dead end of brute force iteration. Most people either over-count (forgetting constraints) or under-count (missing cases). The Math and Combinatorics foundation matters because you're not simulating; you're deriving. Common failure: jumping to code without mapping out the constraint space first. If you're solid on the topics but the specific framing trips you up on test day, StealthCoder runs during your screen share and surfaces a working solution that handles all the cases you might have missed.
Pattern tags
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Distribute Candies Among Children II 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. Made for the engineer who has done the work but might still blank with a webcam pointed at him. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Distribute Candies Among Children II interview FAQ
Is this problem still asked at Amazon, or is it outdated?+
Amazon, Rubrik, and ZS Associates all report asking it. With a 56% acceptance rate and three named companies, it's still relevant. Combinatorics problems don't age out. Expect it in assessments that test algorithmic depth beyond basic sorting or graph traversal.
Do I need advanced combinatorics knowledge, or is high school math enough?+
High school combinatorics covers the fundamentals. The challenge is recognizing how to apply combination formulas or enumeration under constraints, not deriving new math. If you're comfortable with 'choose' notation and basic counting principles, you can solve this.
How much time should I budget to solve this during an OA?+
Once you spot the pattern, 5-10 minutes to code. The real cost is the first 5-10 minutes figuring out which enumeration approach fits. If you blank on the trick, that's where you stall or guess wrong.
What's the biggest mistake people make on this problem?+
Forgetting constraints or misreading the distribution rules. Many candidates write brute force code that generates all possibilities instead of calculating the count directly. Others skip validation, double-counting or missing edge cases entirely.
Is this harder or easier than other medium problems on the assessment?+
At 56% acceptance, it's a typical medium. Not a gimmick problem, not a warm-up. It rewards clear thinking about combinatorics. If Math and Combinatorics are weak spots for you, this one will expose that faster than a sorting problem would.
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