Distinct people from account merges
There are n accounts labeled 0..n-1. You are given a list of merge operations, each [a, b], meaning accounts a and b are declared to belong to the same person. After processing all merges, return the number of distinct people (i.e. the number of connected components). Each account starts as its own person. Merges may be redundant or repeated.
Implement
count_people(n: int, merges: list[list[int]]) → intExamples
in
[5,[[0,1],[1,2],[3,4]]]out2What a strong answer looks like
State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.
0:00 of about 25 min
solution.py
InputExpectedGot
[5,[[0,1],[1,2],[3,4]]]2not run yetsample