题目描述:
There is a stone game.At the beginning of the game the player picks n
piles of stones in a line.
The goal is to merge the stones in one pile observing the following rules:
- At each step of the game,the player can merge two adjacent piles to a new pile.
- The score is the number of stones in the new pile.
You are to determine the minimum of the total score.
For [4, 1, 1, 4]
, in the best solution, the total score is 18
:
1. Merge second and third piles => [4, 2, 4], score +2
2. Merge the first two piles => [6, 4],score +6
3. Merge the last two piles => [10], score +10
Other two examples:
[1, 1, 1, 1]
return 8
[4, 4, 5, 9]
return 43
这题提示用dp解。可以想到,用dp[i][j]来表示合并stone i ~ j所得的最小score,那么求得dp[0][A.size() - 1]就为最后的答案了。那么怎么求dp[i][j]呢?题目是merge score,可以反向思考:每一个merge以后的stone,它是怎么被merge的?它一定是找了两个merge代价最小的stone来merge的。那么可以得到dp的方程为:dp[i][j] = dp[i][k] + dp[k + 1][j] + presum[i][j]。这里presum[i][j]是指在A中i~j所有元素的和;k从i到j - 1遍历,找出所有k中得到的最小dp[i][j],就是最终所求的dp[i][j]. 从dp方程中也可以看出,决定dp[i][j]的并不是stone本身的value(因为presum[i][j]是不变的),而是上一次左右两边的stone各自merge时产生的不同score。
这里为了降低time cost,引入了visited matrix,去记录已经算过的dp[i][j];否则会超时。
Mycode(AC = 218ms):
class Solution {
public:
/**
* @param A an integer array
* @return an integer
*/
int stoneGame(vector<int>& A) {
// Write your code here
if (A.size() == 0) return 0;
// initialize vectors
vector<vector<int>> dp(A.size(), vector<int>(A.size(), INT_MAX));
vector<vector<bool>> visited(A.size(), vector<bool>(A.size(), false));
vector<vector<int>> presum(A.size(), vector<int>(A.size(), 0));
// get the value of presum matrix
for (int i = 0; i < A.size(); i++) {
presum[i][i] = A[i];
for (int j = i + 1; j < A.size(); j++) {
presum[i][j] = presum[i][j - 1] + A[j];
}
}
stoneGame(dp, presum, visited, A, 0, A.size() - 1);
return dp[0][A.size() - 1];
}
void stoneGame(vector<vector<int>>& dp,
vector<vector<int>>& presum,
vector<vector<bool>>& visited,
vector<int>& A,
int start,
int end)
{
// use visited matrix to mark whether
// dp[start][end] is already computed
// to save cost
if (visited[start][end] || start > end) {
return;
}
visited[start][end] = true;
if (start == end) {
dp[start][end] = 0;
}
else {
for (int i = start; i < end; i++) {
stoneGame(dp, presum, visited, A, start, i);
stoneGame(dp, presum, visited, A, i + 1, end);
// the score of start ~ end stone is equal to
// previous scores of two parts + stone values from start to end
dp[start][end] = min(dp[start][end], presum[start][end] + dp[start][i] + dp[i + 1][end]);
}
}
}
};