Asteroid Collision Problem | Dataford Interview Questions

Solve the Asteroid Collision problem.

Asked in the Coding and DevOps/SRE stage. Interviewed in Python; logic was explained first, followed by live coding on the shared terminal.

Input and Output

Given an integer array asteroids, positive values move right and negative values move left. Every asteroid moves at the same speed. Return the array after all possible collisions, preserving the original order of surviving asteroids. A collision occurs only when a right-moving asteroid is immediately followed by a left-moving asteroid. The smaller asteroid is destroyed; equal sizes destroy both.

Constraints

2 <= len(asteroids) <= 10^4
-1000 <= asteroids[i] <= 1000
asteroids[i] != 0

Function Signature

def asteroid_collision(asteroids):

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Problem