[week 9][Leetcode][Dynamic Programming] Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

• Question:

Say you have an array for which thei^th 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.

• Analysis:

使用枚举法是其中一种方法但是会超过限定时间。需要考虑别的方法，首先这个是要决定买入和卖出的时间，并进行一次交易。那么为了确定卖出时间，则应该从数组的最后开始往前考虑，于是得到如下状态转移方程：prices[j]-prices[i] = prices[j]-prices[j-1]+prices[j-1]-prices[j-2]....prices[i+1]-prices[i]; (j>i) i为买入点，j为卖出点。

• Code:

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int result = 0;
        int maxresult = 0;
        const int n = prices.size();
        if (n == 0)
        {
            return 0;
        }
        else
        {
            for (int i = n-1;i>0;i--)
            {
                if (result>=0)
                {
                    result += prices[i] - prices[i-1];
                }
                else
                {
                    result = (prices[i] - prices[i-1]) > 0?(prices[i]-prices[i-1]):0;
                }
                maxresult = result>maxresult?result:maxresult;
            }
            return maxresult;
        }
        
    }
};