Book Store
To try and encourage more sales of different books from a popular 5 book series, a bookshop has decided to offer discounts on multiple book purchases.
One copy of any of the five books costs $8.
If, however, you buy two different books, you get a 5% discount on those two books.
If you buy 3 different books, you get a 10% discount.
If you buy 4 different books, you get a 20% discount.
If you buy all 5, you get a 25% discount.
Note that if you buy four books, of which 3 are different titles, you get a 10% discount on the 3 that form part of a set, but the fourth book still costs $8.
Your mission is to write code to calculate the price of any conceivable shopping basket (containing only books of the same series), giving as big a discount as possible.
For example, how much does this basket of books cost?
- 2 copies of the first book
- 2 copies of the second book
- 2 copies of the third book
- 1 copy of the fourth book
- 1 copy of the fifth book
One way of grouping these 8 books is:
- 1 group of 5 (1st, 2nd,3rd, 4th, 5th)
- 1 group of 3 (1st, 2nd, 3rd)
This would give a total of:
- 5 books at a 25% discount
- 3 books at a 10% discount
Resulting in:
- 5 × (100% - 25%) x 6.00 = $30.00, plus
- 3 × (100% - 10%) x 7.20 = $21.60
Which equals $51.60.
However, a different way to group these 8 books is:
- 1 group of 4 books (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th)
- 1 group of 4 books (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th)
This would give a total of:
- 4 books at a 20% discount
- 4 books at a 20% discount
Resulting in:
- 4 × (100% - 20%) x 6.40 = $25.60, plus
- 4 × (100% - 20%) x 6.40 = $25.60
Which equals $51.20.
And $51.20 is the price with the biggest discount.