LeetCode #712 Minimum ASCII Delete Sum for Two Strings

题目

Given two strings s1, s2, find the lowest ASCII sum of deleted characters to make two strings equal.

Example 1:

Input: s1 = "sea", s2 = "eat"
Output: 231
Explanation: Deleting "s" from "sea" adds the ASCII value of "s" (115) to the sum.
Deleting "t" from "eat" adds 116 to the sum.
At the end, both strings are equal, and 115 + 116 = 231 is the minimum sum possible to achieve this.

Example 2:

Input: s1 = "delete", s2 = "leet"
Output: 403
Explanation: Deleting "dee" from "delete" to turn the string into "let",
adds 100[d]+101[e]+101[e] to the sum.  Deleting "e" from "leet" adds 101[e] to the sum.
At the end, both strings are equal to "let", and the answer is 100+101+101+101 = 403.
If instead we turned both strings into "lee" or "eet", we would get answers of 433 or 417, which are higher.

Note:

1. 0 < s1.length, s2.length <= 1000.
2. All elements of each string will have an ASCII value in [97, 122].

解题思路

典型的动态规划问题。
首先寻找与原问题相同性质的子问题：考虑两个字符串的前缀 s1[1...i] 和 s2[1...j]，可以令 dp[i][j] 表示两个前缀变成一样的字符串所需要的代价。
下一步，求解动态转移方程：考虑 dp[i][j] 与前几项 dp[i - 1][j]、dp[i][j - 1] 和 dp[i - 1][j - 1] 的关系。而 i - 1 与 i 就是相差了最后一个字符。因此当然是考虑当前前缀的最后一个字符是怎样操作使得两个前缀变成一样的字符串的：

• 当 s1[i] == s2[j] 时，此时不用做任何的删除操作，因此有 dp[i][j] = dp[i - 1][j - 1]。
• 当 s1[i] != s2[j] 时，此时对于 dp[i - 1][j] 来说，dp[i][j] 就是增加了 s1[i] 这个字符，而这个字符现在是多余的（因为s1[i] != s2[j]），所以要使当前的两个前缀变成一样的字符串，只需把 s1[i] 删掉即可，则 dp[i][j] = dp[i - 1][j] + s1[i]；同理，对于 dp[i][j - 1] 来说，也只是增加了一个多余字符 s2[j]，则 dp[i][j] = dp[i][j - 1] + s2[j]，取以上两个值的最小值作为 dp[i][j] 的值即可。（要想清楚 dp[i][j] 和 dp[i - 1][j]、dp[i][j - 1]之间到底相差了什么，这样就不需要考虑当 s1[i] == s2[j] 时，要不要同时删掉 s1[i] 和 s2[j] 这种问题，因为这种情况属于 dp[i - 1][j - 1] 的问题，在此不需要考虑！）

C++ 代码实现

class Solution {
public:
    int minimumDeleteSum(string s1, string s2) {
        int dp[1001][1001];

        dp[0][0] = 0;
        for (int i = 1; i <= s2.length(); ++i) { 
            dp[0][i] = dp[0][i - 1] + (int)(s2[i - 1]); 
        }
        for (int i = 1; i <= s1.length(); ++i) { 
            dp[i][0] = dp[i - 1][0] + (int)(s1[i - 1]); 
        }

        for (int i = 1; i <= s1.length(); ++i) {
            for (int j = 1; j <= s2.length(); ++j) {
                if (s1[i - 1] == s2[j - 1]) { 
                    dp[i][j] = dp[i - 1][j - 1]; 
                } else { 
                    dp[i][j] = min(dp[i - 1][j] + s1[i - 1], dp[i][j - 1] + s2[j - 1]); 
                }
            }
        }

        return dp[s1.length()][s2.length()];
    }
};