Alice has n balloons arranged on a rope. You are given a 0-indexed string colors where colors[i] is the color of the ith balloon. Alice wants the rope to be colorful. She does not want two consecutive balloons to be of the same color, so she asks Bo

minCost.js

/**
 * Removes balloons to ensure no two adjacent balloons have the same color,
 * minimizing the total removal time.
 *
 * @param {string} colors - A string where each character represents a balloon's color.
 * @param {number[]} neededTime - An array where each element is the time to remove the corresponding balloon.
 * @return {number} - The minimum total time to remove balloons to satisfy the condition.
 */
var minCost = function(colors, neededTime) {
    let totalTime = 0; // Total time to remove balloons
    let maxTimeInGroup = 0; // Max time in the current group of same-colored balloons

    for (let i = 0; i < colors.length; i++) {
        if (i > 0 && colors[i] !== colors[i - 1]) {
            // New color group starts, reset maxTimeInGroup
            maxTimeInGroup = 0;
        }

        // Add current time to total
        totalTime += neededTime[i];

        // Track the max time in the current group
        maxTimeInGroup = Math.max(maxTimeInGroup, neededTime[i]);

        // If it's the end of a group, subtract the max time (we keep that balloon)
        if (i === colors.length - 1 || colors[i] !== colors[i + 1]) {
            totalTime -= maxTimeInGroup;
        }
    }

    return totalTime;
};