LeetCode Card 282 — Greedy / Assess
Pattern signal
This pattern usually appears when the prompt involves local-choice problems where a proof or intuition shows that the local move supports the global goal. Jump Game, Gas Station, Task Scheduler sub-variants, and interval-selection questions often lean greedy.
What Assess means here
In BASIC, the Assess step is where you compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits. For Greedy, that matters because the pattern only becomes useful once the candidate is explicit about what is being tracked, reduced, or preserved.
Interview move
A strong move is to compare plausible approaches before committing. In this pattern family, say out loud what representation makes the problem easier: the map entry, the pointer invariant, the recursion contract, the queue contents, or the DP state. That keeps the implementation attached to a reason.
Common miss
Candidates choose greedily because it feels fast, not because they can justify why the local rule works. BASIC reduces that risk because the stage sequence forces you to earn the implementation instead of jumping straight into it.
BASIC prompt
“Given that this looks like Greedy, what is the simplest way to compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits?”