This is just a short one. I ballsed-up a coupla things in my previous article: "Another Friday puzzle; and the importance of tests that try to break code". It should have also read "and the importance of following the spec". Ahem.
So the bit of the question I read was this:
The maximum sum subarray problem consists in finding the maximum sum of a contiguous subsequence in an array or list of integers:And I admonished John and Isaiah for not dealing with sets with only negative numbers in them. My solution "worked" in that it returned the highest-total subset (basically a subset containing just the single highest negative number). They were returning 0, which I figured was an oversight / edge-case-failure.
maxSequence([-2, 1, -3, 4, -1, 2, 1, -5, 4]) // should be 6: [4, -1, 2, 1]
However elsewhere, if I was to continue reading (or following links, or something), it did indeed say something about the minimum total being 0, even if the set contained only negative numbers. Oops.
Another contentious point was that I figured if the set was empty, then the result should be undefined or null. This is showing-up my lack of mathematical background, in that there's well-established rules for this, which Ryan pointed out to me: "Operations on the empty set". Basically it's taken as written that the sum of an empty set is zero. So it's official.
Now... whilst my solution was - as a result of these facts - wrong, I still think the exercise was a useful one, so I'll update that article to point to this, but otherwise leave it as is.
And that's it. Just thanks to John, Isaiah and Ryan for setting me straight there.
Righto.
--
Adam
