How to solve the Candy problem?

The problem is:

There are N children standing in a line. Each child is assigned a rating value.

You are giving candies to these children subjected to the following requirements:

• Each child must have at least one candy.
• Children with a higher rating get more candies than their neighbors.

We can use the piece of code to solve the problem:

namespace
{
    template <typename I>
    size_t candy(I begin, I end)
    {
        int ret = 0;
        int assignment = 1;
        while ( begin < end ) {
            I i = begin;
            int sum = 0;

            // what is the loop invariant?
            size_t n = std::distance(begin, end);
            if (n > 1) {
                if (*i < *(i + 1)) {
                    while ((i + 1) < end && *i < *(i + 1)) {
                        sum += assignment;
                        ++assignment;
                        ++i;
                    }
                }
                else if (*i > *(i + 1)) {
                    I j = i;
                    while ((i + 1) < end && *i > *(i + 1)) {
                        sum += assignment;
                        --assignment;
                        ++i;
                    }
                    if (assignment > 1) {
                        int v = assignment - 1;
                        v *= (static_cast<int>(i - j) - 1);
                        sum -= v;
                    }
                    else if (assignment < 1) {
                        int v = 1 - assignment;
                        v *= static_cast<int>(i - j);
                        sum += v;
                    }
                    assignment = 1;
                }
                else {
                    while ((i + 1) < end && *i == *(i + 1)) {
                        sum += assignment;
                        assignment = 1;
                        ++i;
                    }
                }
            }
            else {
                sum += assignment;
                ++i;
            }
            ret  += sum;
            begin = i;
        }
        return static_cast<size_t>(ret);
    }
}