[NeetCode 150] House Robber II

House Robber II

You are given an integer array nums where nums[i] represents the amount of money the ith house has. The houses are arranged in a circle, i.e. the first house and the last house are neighbors.

You are planning to rob money from the houses, but you cannot rob two adjacent houses because the security system will automatically alert the police if two adjacent houses were both broken into.

Return the maximum amount of money you can rob without alerting the police.

Example 1:

Input: nums = [3,4,3]

Output: 4

Explanation: You cannot rob nums[0] + nums[2] = 6 because nums[0] and nums[2] are adjacent houses. The maximum you can rob is nums[1] = 4.

Example 2:

Input: nums = [2,9,8,3,6]

Output: 15

Explanation: You cannot rob nums[0] + nums[2] + nums[4] = 16 because nums[0] and nums[4] are adjacent houses. The maximum you can rob is nums[1] + nums[4] = 15.

Constraints:

1 <= nums.length <= 100
0 <= nums[i] <= 100

Solution

Compared with House Robber, the only difference is that the first num and the last num are adjacent now, which brings the restriction that we cannot break into these two houses together. Then why not we just don’t let them appear in the same array, by solving House Robber twice!

We can solve House Robber problem on nums[1:] and nums[:-1] respectively and get the maximum. Notice that when there is only one house, it should be specially judged.

Code

class Solution:
    def get_ans(self, nums):
        max1, max2 = 0, 0
        for num in nums:
            cur = max(max1, max2+num)
            max2 = max1
            max1 = cur
        return max1

    def rob(self, nums: List[int]) -> int:
        return max(nums[0], self.get_ans(nums[1:]), self.get_ans(nums[:-1]))