Question bank › Greedy
Dsa Greedy Hard

Minimum Cost to Connect Ropes

You have a number of ropes of different lengths that you want to connect into one rope. The cost of connecting two ropes is equal to the sum of their lengths. Write a program that reads the list of rope lengths from STDIN and prints the minimum cost of connecting them all into a single rope to STDOUT. Input format: An integer n (1 <= n <= 1000) followed by n integers (1 <= lengths[i] <= 10^4) representing the lengths of the ropes. Output format: A single integer, which is the minimum cost of connecting all ropes. Example: Input: 4 4 3 2 6 Output: 29

Key concepts

greedypriority queue

Practise this out loud — free

Start a mock interview on THIS exact question — a voice AI interviewer opens with it, pushes back like a real onsite, then hands you an instant scorecard.

🎙 Practise this question now
Part of Praxari's verified interview question bank. We show the prompt and concepts to practise with — never a copy-paste solution.