INFOTECH Coding Question – Solved

```
To solve the problem of determining the order of succession for the King's children based on their seniority, we need to carefully analyze the input data and understand the rules for ranking them. The data is given as a table with three columns: name, gender, and birthday. Our task is to produce a list ordered by age, and for each heir, prefix their name with a title according to their gender: "King" for males and "Queen" for females.

The main goal is to rank the children based on seniority, which means the order should be from the eldest child to the youngest. The birthday attribute, guaranteed to be unique for each child, provides a perfect means of determining this order. We do not need to worry about ties or same birthdays since the uniqueness constraint ensures that each birthday can be strictly ordered.

Here is a structured way to think about this:

1. **Understand the Sorting Criterion:**
Since seniority is determined by age, the child with the earliest birthday date is the eldest. This means the ordering should be ascending by the birthday column when interpreted as dates. The oldest birthday comes first, followed by the next oldest, and so on.

2. **Data Type and Ordering of Birthdays:**
Birthdays are dates, typically formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. These date strings can be sorted lexicographically to obtain the correct chronological order because the format aligns with the natural date ordering. So, simply sorting the data by the birthday field ascending will arrange the children from oldest to youngest.

3. **Assigning Titles Based on Gender:**
Each child is assigned a title prefix based on gender:
- If gender is 'M', prefix the child's name with "King"
- If gender is 'F', prefix with "Queen"
This is a straightforward mapping. The gender column acts as a simple conditional check to decide the prefix.

4. **Maintaining Output Format:**
The output should be a list or table of strings where each string represents a successor with their title and name, e.g., "King John" or "Queen Amelia". This implies constructing the output by combining the title prefix and the name for each child, respecting the order from step 1.

5. **Data Integrity and Validation:**
Since birthday uniqueness is guaranteed, we don't need to handle edge cases related to ties. The gender field is guaranteed to be either 'M' or 'F', so there are no other unexpected values. Still, if you were designing a solution, you might want to consider data validation for robustness.

6. **Edge Cases to Consider:**
- If the table contains only one child, the result is a single successor with the appropriate title.
- If there are many children, the sorting algorithm should efficiently handle large datasets. Sorting by date is efficient and straightforward.
- The possibility of future extensions, such as handling deceased children or removing them from the list, is not within the current scope but could be an enhancement.

7. **Mapping the Approach to Implementation:**
Conceptually, this problem maps well to a sorting operation followed by a transformation:
- Sort the rows by birthday ascending (earliest to latest)
- For each row, create a string that concatenates the title ("King" or "Queen") and the name
- Return or print the ordered list

8. **Potential SQL Analogy:**
If you think of this as a database query problem, the solution could be described as:
- SELECT name, gender, birthday FROM Successors
- ORDER BY birthday ASC
- For each row, CASE gender WHEN 'M' THEN 'King ' ELSE 'Queen ' END || name AS title_name

9. **Summary of the Steps:**
- Parse the input data to get all children’s records
- Sort these records by birthday ascending to get the seniority order
- For each child, prepend their name with the correct title based on their gender
- Collect the results in the required output format and output

By following this thought process, you can solve the problem efficiently, ensuring the successors are listed from eldest to youngest, each properly titled according to their gender.
```