leetcode 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 (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Note that you cannot sell a stock before you buy one.

Example 1:

Input: [7,1,5,3,6,4]
Output: 5
Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 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
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

给定一个数组，计算其先后两个元素的最大差值。第一感觉也是最直观的解法是两次遍历数组，时间复杂度为O(n^2)，代码如下：

 int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int ret = 0;
        int tmp_max = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < prices.size(); i++)
        {
            tmp_max = 0;
            for(int j = i + 1; j < prices.size(); j++)
            {
                if(tmp_max < prices[j])
                    tmp_max = prices[j];
            }
            ret = max(ret, tmp_max - prices[i]);
        }
        return ret;
    }

但是，这显然不是最优解，提交后只能到20%的排名。联想起编程珠玑中有个类似的题，里边是计算数组中连续元素最大和的问题，其中耗时最小的算法只需要一次遍历数组即可，主要思想是维护一个元素最小值和一个结果最大值，遍历数组的过程中同时更新这两个值（有点类似之前判断平衡二叉树的过程，遍历深度的同时去判断平衡）。代码记录如下：

 int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int max_ret = 0;
        if(prices.empty())
            return max_ret;
        int min = prices[0];
        for(int i = 0; i < prices.size(); i++)
        {
            if(min > prices[i])
                min = prices[i];
            else
            {
                if(max_ret < prices[i] - min)
                    max_ret = prices[i] - min;
            }
        }
        return max_ret;
    }