1636: [Usaco2007 Jan]Balanced Lineup # Time Limit: 5 Sec Memory Limit: 64 MB Submit: 680 Solved: 493 [Submit][Status][Discuss]
Description # For the daily milking, Farmer John’s N cows (1 <= N <= 50,000) always line up in the same order. One day Farmer John decides to organize a game of Ultimate Frisbee with some of the cows. To keep things simple, he will take a contiguous range of cows from the milking lineup to play the game. However, for all the cows to have fun they should not differ too much in height. Farmer John has made a list of Q (1 <= Q <= 200,000) potential groups of cows and their heights (1 <= height <= 1,000,000). For each group, he wants your help to determine the difference in height between the shortest and the tallest cow in the group.
1689: [Usaco2005 Open] Muddy roads 泥泞的路 # Time Limit: 5 Sec Memory Limit: 64 MB Submit: 311 Solved: 227 [Submit][Status][Discuss]
Description # Farmer John has a problem: the dirt road from his farm to town has suffered in the recent rainstorms and now contains (1 <= N <= 10,000) mud pools. Farmer John has a collection of wooden planks of length L that he can use to bridge these mud pools. He can overlap planks and the ends do not need to be anchored on the ground. However, he must cover each pool completely. Given the mud pools, help FJ figure out the minimum number of planks he needs in order to completely cover all the mud pools.