121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

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.

思路：
从这道题目开始，我们会遇到一系列Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock的题目。依次是：
122 Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II
123 Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock III
188 Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock IV
309 Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock with Cooldown
121这道题这一系列题目当中最简单的题目。思路也很直接，就是用Dynamic Programming。

题目里面说只能进行一次买卖。我们先用一个变量minPrice来保存包括第i天的价格prices[i]在内的当前最低价格，也就是minPrice = min(minPrice, prices[i]);
然后再用一个变量maxProfit来保存如果在第i天卖出（之前在minPrice时候买入的）股票能得到的最大收益，与过去（也就是截止到第i天以前）取得最大收益相比较，更大的那个值，也就是 maxProfit = max(maxProfit, prices[i] - minPrice);

代码如下：

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
    if(prices.empty()) return 0;

    int minPrice = INT_MAX;
    int maxProfit = 0;
    for(int i = 0; i < prices.size(); ++i){
        minPrice = min(minPrice, prices[i]);
        maxProfit = max(maxProfit, prices[i] - minPrice);
    }
    return maxProfit;
    }
};