Ticket Office C++ Problem

Question

So I'm in the middle of the Ticket Office problem in C++, and I'm having trouble figuring out where I've gone wrong. Here's the premise of the problem:

You are working on a ticketing system. A ticket costs $10.
The office is running a discount campaign: each group of 5 people is getting a discount, which is determined by the age of the youngest person in the group.
You need to create a program that takes the ages of all 5 people as input and outputs the total price of the tickets.

Sample Input:
55
28
15
38
63

Sample Output:
42.5

The youngest age is 15, so the group gets a 15% discount from the total price, which is $50 - 15% = $42.5
My code works just fine for test cases 1 and 3, but it runs into a weird problem where it just skips over a number for test case 2.

Here's my code for reference:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
int ages[5];

for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
cin >> ages[i];
}
//your code goes here
float youngest = ages[0];
float discount = youngest/100;

for (int j = 0; j < 5; j++){
if(youngest > ages[j+1]){
youngest = ages[j];

}

}
float total = 50-(50*discount);
cout << total;

return 0;
}

Answer 1

Hmm, i guess you should check which one is the youngest before calculating discount. And i recommend you to do calculations on floats (writing 100.0 instead of 100 etc.) Idk if it is really needed, but it is probably a good habit while working On floats.

And why do you check ages[j+1]? Use just "j", indexing start from 0 to n-1, where n is the number of elements in the array, so your for loop is reading some random memory, which causes errors. Change the condition to j<4, or check ages[j] in the if statement

Answer 2

The problem is, that you did not update your "discount" variable. You can use a pointer if u want. I got ya.

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char**argv)
{
int people[5];
int* smallest = &people[0];// youngest person,
// smallest in age.
// the pointer will be updated,
// no need to copy values
// repeatedly

for(int i=0; i<5; i++){
std::cin >> people[i];
if(people[i] < *smallest) smallest = &people[i];
}

const float total = 50 - (0.5 * (*smallest));
std::cout << total; // hooray (:
return 0;
}

Answer 3

// try this

int youngest = ages[0];
for (int i=1; i<5; i++) if(youngest > ages[i]) youngest = ages[i];
float total = 50-(.5*youngest);
cout << total;

Answer 4

The discount variable was absolutely the problem. Thanks to y’all for your help!