Suppose we have a series of scooters to be collected, positioned up and down the Santa Monica broadwalk. Each one has a score ranging from 0-10, which represents how important we think it is to that scooter. We want to assign a price to each of them such that if a scooter has a higher score than one of its neighbours, we assign it a higher price (to incentivize collection). Given a list of scooter scores matching the order of the scooters, what is the minimum total cost (assuming all prices are integers, and every scooter must have a price of at least 1)?

- high level design of an existing system