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You have n candies and m children. The goal is to distribute all the candies among the children such that every child gets exactly one candy. You need to determine if it’s possible to distribute the candies according to the given constraints.

Clarifying Questions:

  1. If n is less than m, should we return False since we can’t give one candy to each child?
    • Yes.
  2. If n is a non-integer or m is a non-integer, how should the function behave?
    • The function should assume n and m are always non-negative integers.
  3. Is there any specific output format required?
    • The function should return a boolean value: True if it’s possible to distribute the candies as required, False otherwise.

Strategy:

Given the constraints:

  1. Each child must receive exactly one candy.
  2. To satisfy this, the number of candies n should be at least equal to the number of children m.

Thus, the solution involves a simple comparison:

Time Complexity:

The time complexity of this approach is (O(1)) because we are performing a single comparison operation.

Code:

Here is the implementation in Python:

def canDistributeCandies(n: int, m: int) -> bool:
    # Check if we have at least as many candies as children
    return n >= m

# Testing the function
print(canDistributeCandies(5, 3))  # Expected: True (5 candies can be distributed among 3 children)
print(canDistributeCandies(4, 5))  # Expected: False (4 candies are not enough for 5 children)
print(canDistributeCandies(10, 10))  # Expected: True (exactly 10 candies for 10 children)
print(canDistributeCandies(0, 0))  # Expected: True (0 candies for 0 children, trivially true)
print(canDistributeCandies(1, 2))  # Expected: False (1 candy is not enough for 2 children)

This solution is efficient and straightforward, perfectly aligning with the constraints and requirements of the problem.

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