Lets say your job is to paint poles, and a client asks you to paint a pole with 4 red sections and 3 yellow sections. You can do that pretty easily as follows:
r y r y r y r
With just yellow and red stripes. Now lets say your client asks you to paint a pole with 2 red sections, 2 yellow sections, and 1 green section. There are a couple of ways you could paint your pole
g y r y r
y g r y r
y r g y r
y r y g r
y r y r g
g r y r y
r g y r y
r y g r y
r y r g y
r y r y g
y r g r y
r y g y r
More precisely thats 12 ways to paint the pole. This blows up the more colors and sections that are involved
Now if your client says they want 3 red sections and 1 yellow section there is no way to paint a pole like that. Because no matter how you attempt to arrange the sections two red sections will touch, and when two red sections touch they become a single red section.
And that is pretty much our one rule for painting poles
Adjacent sections may not be of the same color
Task
Given a list of colors and sections required, output the number of possible ways to paint a pole as requested. You may represent colors in any reasonable way (integers, characters, strings), but you will never be given more than 255 different colors at a time. If you wish you can even choose to not have the colors assigned names and just take a list of section counts if that is easier.
Test Cases
These are rather hard to calculate by hand, especially as they get larger. If anyone has a suggested test case I'll add it.
[4,3] -> 1
[2,2,1] -> 12
[3,1] -> 0
[8,3,2] -> 0
[2,2,1,1]-> 84
[1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2]
? I suppose so. \$\endgroup\$