[Codility] Lesson-05.2: GenomicRangeQuery

YeongHyeon Park
3 min readDec 12, 2020

In this post, we will find the priority letter and coefficient of them in several DNA subsequences.

Task Description

A DNA sequence can be represented as a string consisting of the letters A, C, G and T, which correspond to the types of successive nucleotides in the sequence. Each nucleotide has an impact factor, which is an integer. Nucleotides of types A, C, G and T have impact factors of 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. You are going to answer several queries of the form: What is the minimal impact factor of nucleotides contained in a particular part of the given DNA sequence?

The DNA sequence is given as a non-empty string S = S[0]S[1]…S[N-1] consisting of N characters. There are M queries, which are given in non-empty arrays P and Q, each consisting of M integers. The K-th query (0 ≤ K < M) requires you to find the minimal impact factor of nucleotides contained in the DNA sequence between positions P[K] and Q[K] (inclusive).

For example, consider string S = CAGCCTA and arrays P, Q such that:

P[0] = 2 Q[0] = 4

P[1] = 5 Q[1] = 5

P[2] = 0 Q[2] = 6

The answers to these M = 3 queries are as follows:

  • The part of the DNA between positions 2 and 4 contains nucleotides G and C (twice), whose impact factors are 3 and 2 respectively, so the answer is 2.
  • The part between positions 5 and 5 contains a single nucleotide T, whose impact factor is 4, so the answer is 4.
  • The part between positions 0 and 6 (the whole string) contains all nucleotides, in particular nucleotide A whose impact factor is 1, so the answer is 1.

Write a function:

def solution(S, P, Q)

that, given a non-empty string S consisting of N characters and two non-empty arrays P and Q consisting of M integers, returns an array consisting of M integers specifying the consecutive answers to all queries.

Result array should be returned as an array of integers.

For example, given the string S = CAGCCTA and arrays P, Q such that:

P[0] = 2 Q[0] = 4

P[1] = 5 Q[1] = 5

P[2] = 0 Q[2] = 6

the function should return the values [2, 4, 1], as explained above.

Write an efficient algorithm for the following assumptions:

  • N is an integer within the range [1..100,000];
  • M is an integer within the range [1..50,000];
  • each element of arrays P, Q is an integer within the range [0..N − 1];
  • P[K] ≤ Q[K], where 0 ≤ K < M;
  • string S consists only of upper-case English letters A, C, G, T.

Copyright 2009–2020 by Codility Limited. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized copying, publication or disclosure prohibited.

Key Point

  • Find accurately the priority letter in each subsequence via given indices.
  • Avoid timeout situations. For example, the linear search method consumes much more time when the given DNA sequence is long.

Solution (using Python)

def solution(S, P, Q):
M, letters = [], {'A':1, 'C':2, 'G':3, 'T':4}
for idx in range(len(P)):
for key in list(letters.keys()):
if(key in S[P[idx]:Q[idx]+1]):
min_coeff = letters[key]
break
M.append(min_coeff)
return M

Please use the above solution for reference.
I recommend you to write your own source code.

--

--