[leetcode 256] Paint House

Question:

There are a row of n houses, each house can be painted with one of the three colors: red, blue or green. The cost of painting each house with a certain color is different. You have to paint all the houses such that no two adjacent houses have the same color.

The cost of painting each house with a certain color is represented by a n x 3 cost matrix. For example, costs[0][0] is the cost of painting house 0 with color red;costs[1][2] is the cost of painting house 1 with color green, and so on... Find the minimum cost to paint all houses.

Note:

All costs are positive integers.

分析：

题目要求：有n个房子需要粉刷，只有三种颜色：红，蓝，绿。还有一个代价矩阵cost[n][3],表示粉刷第i个房子粉刷三种颜色的分别代价。求粉刷n个房子的最小代价。

解析：此问题可用动态规划问题解决，动态规划问题的子问题解也是最优解，即若求解n个房子粉刷的最小代价，可先求解n-1个房子的最小代价。

粉刷每个房子都有三个解（第i个房子粉刷红色时的最小代价，第i个房子粉刷蓝色时的最小代价，第i个房子粉刷绿色时的最小代价），如果第i个房子粉刷红色，则第i-1个房子不能粉刷红色，则截至到第i个房子的最小代价为粉刷红的代价+截止到第i-1个房子的最小代价（即第i-1个房子粉刷蓝色或绿色的最小代价）。

代码如下：

<span style="font-size:14px;">class Solution {
public:
    int minCost(vector<vector<int>>& costs) {
        if (costs.empty()) return 0;
        int n = costs.size(), r = 0, g = 0, b = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
            int rr = r, bb = b, gg = g; 
            r = costs[i][0] + min(bb, gg);
            b = costs[i][1] + min(rr, gg);
            g = costs[i][2] + min(rr, bb);
        }
        return min(r, min(b, g));
    } 
};</span>