121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

问题描述

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Example 1:

Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]
Output: 5

max. difference = 6-1 = 5 (not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price)

Example 2:

Input: [7, 6, 4, 3, 1]
Output: 0

In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

题目链接：

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思路分析

给出每天股票价格，只能买入一股和卖出一股，计算在这段时间内的最大可能利润。粗暴的计算每天的利润，如果都小于0就返回0；或者返回最大值。

代码

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        if(prices.empty())
            return 0;
        int max = 0, profit;
        for(int i = prices.size() - 1; i > 0 ; i--){
            for(int j = i - 1; j >= 0; j--){
                profit = prices[i] - prices[j];
                if(profit > max)
                    max = profit;
            }
        }
        return max;
    }
};

时间复杂度：O(n²) //n为vector的元素个数

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反思

很粗暴，参观讨论区之后学习了只用一个循环的算法。不断记录当前的最小价格，因为只有最小的价格是有意义来计算最大利润的。然后不断更新的到的最大利润。

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        if(prices.empty())
            return 0;
        int maxprofit = 0, minprice = INT_MAX;
        for(int i = 0; i < prices.size(); i++){
            minprice = min(minprice, prices[i]);
            maxprofit = max(maxprofit, prices[i] - minprice);
        }
        return maxprofit;
    }
};