Coding: Values of Alphabet | Dataford Interview Questions

Illumina sequencing workflows may score many candidate reads or genomic signals and retain only a fixed number of the highest-scoring values. Given an integer array and a positive integer k, return the largest possible sum obtained by selecting exactly k elements.

Each array position may be selected at most once, but the selected elements do not need to be contiguous. Values may be negative, and the original order is irrelevant.

Formal Specification

Implement max_sum_k(nums, k).

Input: nums, a list of n integers, and k, an integer.
Output: An integer equal to the maximum sum of any k elements from nums.
You must select exactly k elements.

Constraints

1 <= k <= len(nums)
1 <= len(nums) <= 10^5
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
The result fits within Python's integer range

Function Signature

def max_sum_k(nums, k):

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