Round-Robin Tournament Matches | Dataford Interview Questions

ST Engineering Aerospace is validating a tournament scheduler for a competition involving aircraft maintenance teams. In a single round-robin tournament, every team plays every other team exactly once. Given the number of teams, calculate the total number of matches without simulating the schedule.

Formal Specification

Implement count_matches(team_count):

Input: team_count, a positive integer representing the number of teams.
Output: An integer equal to the number of unique matches in the tournament.
A match between teams A and B is the same as a match between teams B and A, so count each pair once.

Constraints

1 <= team_count <= 10^9
team_count is an integer
Each pair of teams plays exactly once
Do not generate individual matches

Function Signature

def count_matches(team_count):

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Problem