Connecting Two Barns
Attempt 1
I made a very basic mistake in trying to solve this problem. I based all of my thinking around the sample test case, and the sample test case was very weak and misleading. Usually, I'm able to catch myself because I try to test out solutions on hand-made test cases before implementation but in this case my thinking was so heavily based off the sample test case that all the hand-made test cases I made looked like the sample test case.
The glaring hole in my mental model of the problem was the fact that I assumed that all the connected components had to be consecutive numbers, which was insanely stupid. With that constraint, the problem was so trivial that I instantly knew the solution and spent several minutes trying to figure out what I was missing (because there was no way it could be this easy). Then, hubris kicked in and I decided that maybe it felt easy because I was improving and I decided to implement anyways. Needless to say, the implementation was very off.
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