Minimum number of moves to seat everyone

Array Greedy Sorting Counting Sort

87.2% acceptance

Feb 25, 2026

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There are n availabe seats and n students standing in a room. You are given an array seats of length n, where seats[i] is the position of the ith seat. You are also given the array students of length n, where students[j] is the position of the jth student. You may perform the following move any number of times: Increase or decrease the position of the ith student by 1 (i.e., moving the ith student from position x to x + 1 or x - 1) Return the minimum number of moves required to move each student to a seat such that no two students are in the same seat. Note that there may be multiple seats or students in the same position at the beginning.

Solution

Rust

Time O(n log n)

Space O(1)

LeetCode

solution.rs

impl Solution {
  pub fn min_moves_to_seat(mut seats: Vec<i32>, mut students: Vec<i32>) -> i32 {
    seats.sort_unstable();
    students.sort_unstable();
    seats.iter().zip(students.iter()).map(|(s, t)| (s - t).abs()).sum()
  }
}