Maybe because some programmers are programmed to program programmatically... rather than to think ;)

such problems don't score well on CW :(

@k2bralex - the input array represents the time series of the price of a company stock/share.

For simplicity, consider case with only 2 time periods - say [3,17].

If you bought one stock at time t=0 (index 0) and sold it at time t=1 (index 1) you would make a profit of 17 - 3 = 14. This is the maximum possible profit you can make with this input array.

Now if there are, say, 3 time periods - it becomes a bit more difficult: [3,8,17] for example: this allows you to buy one stock at time t=0 at price 3, and buy another stock at time t=1, at price 8, and then sell both stocks at time t=2 for price 17. What is total profit you made? It is (17-3) + (17-8) in this case.

Now even more complicated is case like in description: [ 1, 2, 10, 3, 2, 7, 3, 2 ] where you might have to buy and sell at multiple times.

I`m looking at this task 15 minutes and cant understand what is a process(((

The new example test case is added ;)

maybe 46?