Maximum profit of operating a centennial wheel

Array Simulation

44.5% acceptance

Feb 25, 2026

111

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You are the operator of a Centennial Wheel that has four gondolas, and each gondola has room for up to four people. You have the ability to rotate the gondolas counterclockwise, which costs you runningCost dollars. You are given an array customers of length n where customers[i] is the number of new customers arriving just before the ith rotation. Return the minimum number of rotations you need to perform to maximize your profit. If there is no scenario where the profit is positive, return -1.

Solution

Rust

Time O(n)

Space O(1)

LeetCode

solution.rs

impl Solution {
  pub fn min_operations_max_profit(customers: Vec<i32>, boarding_cost: i32, running_cost: i32) -> i32 {
    let mut waiting = 0i32;
    let mut profit = 0i32;
    let mut max_profit = 0i32;
    let mut best_rot = -1i32;
    let mut rot = 0i32;
    let n = customers.len();

    let mut i = 0;
    while i < n || waiting > 0 {
      if i < n {
        waiting += customers[i];
        i += 1;
      }
      let board = waiting.min(4);
      waiting -= board;
      profit += board * boarding_cost - running_cost;
      rot += 1;
      if profit > max_profit {
        max_profit = profit;
        best_rot = rot;
      }
    }
    best_rot
  }
}