I'm stuck on how to formulate this problem properly and the following is:

What if we had the following values:

{('A','B','C','D'):3, 
('A','C','B','D'):2,
('B','D','C','A'):4,
('D','C','B','A'):3,
('C','B','A','D'):1,
('C','D','A','B'):1}

When we sum up the first place values: [5,4,2,3] (5 people picked for A first, 4 people picked for B first, and so on like A = 5, B = 4, C = 2, D = 3)

The maximum values for any alphabet is 5, which isn't a majority (5/14 is less than half), where 14 is the sum of total values.

So we remove the alphabet with the fewest first place picks. Which in this case is C.

I want to return a dictionary where {'A':5, 'B':4, 'C':2, 'D':3} without importing anything.

This is my work:

def popular(letter):
    '''(dict of {tuple of (str, str, str, str): int}) -> dict of {str:int}
    '''
    my_dictionary = {}
    counter = 0

    for (alphabet, picks) in letter.items():
        if (alphabet[0]):
            my_dictionary[alphabet[0]] = picks
        else:
            my_dictionary[alphabet[0]] = counter

    return my_dictionary

This returns duplicate of keys which I cannot get rid of.

Thanks.