Most Active Period

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Medium

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Logic, Loops

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Solution

Most Active Period: Solution

In this challenge, you will find the window of time when the most authors were active.

You have biographic data like this:

All authors become active on or after the year 1900. All stopped being active on or before 1999.

For this data, there is one period, 1920-1945, where there were three authors active (Alice, Bob, and Carol). Therefore, this is the range you want to find.

You should write a function, most_active, which takes biographical data and returns a tuple of (window-start, window-end), like this:

>>> data = [
...    ('Alice', 1901, 1950),
...    ('Bob',   1920, 1960),
...    ('Carol', 1908, 1945),
...    ('Dave',  1951, 1960),
... ]

>>> most_active(data)
(1920, 1945)

If there’s more than one period with the same number of active authors, find the earliest:

>>> data = [
...    ('Alice', 1901, 1950),
...    ('Bob',   1920, 1960),
...    ('Carol', 1908, 1945),
...    ('Dave',  1951, 1960),
...    ('Eve',   1955, 1985),
... ]

>>> most_active(data)
(1920, 1945)

(Alice, Bob, Carol were active 1920-1945. Bob, Dave, and Eve were active 1951-1960. Since there’s a tie, the first was returned)

Your program should run in linear O(n) time.

We’ve given you a function, most_active. Implement it:

def most_active(bio_data):
    """Find window of time when most authors were active."""