LeetCode -11. Container With Most Water（最大盛水、经典“哨兵”题）

LeetCode - 11. Container With Most Water

Given n non-negative integers a1, a2, …, an , where each represents a point at coordinate (i, ai). n vertical lines are drawn such that the two endpoints of line i is at (i, ai) and (i, 0). Find two lines, which together with x-axis forms a container, such that the container contains the most water.

The above vertical lines are represented by array [1,8,6,2,5,4,8,3,7].
In this case, the max area of water (blue section) the container can contain is 49.

  这种一行的东西里遍历的题，基本都离不开“哨兵”位，也就是两个“哨兵”分别在最左和最右，然后向里边夹逼。循环的条件一般都是while(left < right)，在这个过程中最重要的就是判断哪个哨兵进行移动，在这道题中，我们可以看到“木桶效应”，也就是短板限制了水的多少，所以每次都是哨兵位上板子短的哨兵进行移动，这样就可以跳过很多不可能是最大值的情况，算法效率变高。AC代码如下：

int maxArea(vector<int>& height) {
    int l = 0, r = height.size() - 1, max_water = -1;
    while(l < r) {
        max_water = max(max_water, (r - l) * min(height[l], height[r]));
        if(height[l] < height[r])   ++l;	// 两个哨兵位相等的时候，++l 和 --r 都可以。
        else                        --r;
    }
    return max_water;
}