Hackerrank - Cutting Paper Squares Solution

Mary has an  piece of paper that she wants to cut into  pieces according to the following rules:

• She can only cut one piece of paper at a time, meaning she cannot fold the paper or layer already-cut pieces on top of one another.
• Each cut is a straight line from one side of the paper to the other side of the paper. For example, the diagram below depicts the three possible ways to cut a  piece of paper:
  

Given  and , find and print the minimum number of cuts Mary must make to cut the paper into  squares that are  unit in size.

Input Format

A single line of two space-separated integers denoting the respective values of  and .

Constraints

Output Format

Print a long integer denoting the minimum number of cuts needed to cut the entire paper into  squares.

Sample Input

3 1

Sample Output

2

Explanation

Mary first cuts the  piece of paper into a  piece and a  piece. She then cuts the  piece into two  pieces:

Because it took her two cuts to get  pieces of size , we print  as our answer.

Solution in Python

import math
import os
import random
import re
import sys
# Complete the solve function below.
def solve(n, m):
    return n*m-1
if __name__ == '__main__':
    fptr = open(os.environ['OUTPUT_PATH'], 'w')
    nm = input().split()
    n = int(nm[0])
    m = int(nm[1])
    result = solve(n, m)
    fptr.write(str(result) + '\n')
    fptr.close()