15. Candy – LeetCode 135 🍬 Two-Pass vs Peak–Valley Greedy | Elegant & Interview-Ready!

In this episode of the LeetCode 150 Series, we break down LeetCode 135 — Candy, one of the most elegant greedy problems that shows up in real interviews at Meta, Amazon, and Google.

You’ll learn two powerful strategies:

🍭 Approach 1 — The Classic Two-Pass Technique
Left-to-right sweep to enforce increasing ratings
Right-to-left sweep to fix violations
Guarantees fairness + minimal candies
Intuitive, clean, and O(n) time

⛰️ Approach 2 — Peak–Valley Greedy Breakdown
Identify rising slopes (peaks) and falling slopes (valleys)
Add candies for both slopes while adjusting the peak overlap
Achieves the same optimal result using slope lengths

This video gives you crystal-clear intuition, real-world analogies, and the reasoning patterns interviewers expect.

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