Merge Adjacent Equal Numbers | Dataford Interview Questions

Given an array, you can merge two adjacent equal numbers into one; return the smallest final array after applying operations optimally.

A merge replaces equal adjacent values x, x with 2 * x. Choose the operations that produce the shortest final array; if several results have the same length, return the lexicographically smallest one. For signed values, a value created from a negative pair is not merged again.

Implement merge_equal_adjacent(nums), which accepts a list of integers and returns the resulting list.

Constraints:

1 <= len(nums) <= 200
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9

Constraints

1 <= len(nums) <= 200
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
A merge replaces x, x with 2 * x
A value created from a negative pair is not merged again
Among shortest results, choose the lexicographically smallest array

Function Signature

def merge_equal_adjacent(nums):

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