Algorithms（五）Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

题目：

121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Say you have an array for which the i^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.

代码：

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int maxCur = 0, maxSoFar = 0;
        for(int i = 1; i < prices.size(); i++) {
            maxCur = max(0, maxCur += prices[i] - prices[i - 1]);
            maxSoFar = max(maxCur, maxSoFar);
        }
        return maxSoFar;
    }
private:
    int max(int a, int b) {
        if(a < b) {
            return b;
        } else {
            return a;
        }
    }
};

算法：

这个问题的重点是计算原始数组的差异（maxcur + = 价格[i] - 价格[i - 1]），并找到一个连续子序列的最大利润。即当差值低于0时，将其重置为零，并将当前子序列的最大利润与历史记录中子序列的最大利润不断对比，得到所求值。