leetcode 122. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II

1. Question

Say you have an array prices for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

Design an algorithm to find the maximum profit. You may complete as many transactions as you like (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock multiple times).

Note: You may not engage in multiple transactions at the same time (i.e., you must sell the stock before you buy again).

Example 1:

Input: [7,1,5,3,6,4]
Output: 7
Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 3 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4.
             Then buy on day 4 (price = 3) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-3 = 3.


Example 2:

Input: [1,2,3,4,5]
Output: 4
Explanation: Buy on day 1 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4.
             Note that you cannot buy on day 1, buy on day 2 and sell them later, as you are
             engaging multiple transactions at the same time. You must sell before buying again.



Example 3:

Input: [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

2. Solution

2.1 brute force & recursive

# brute force
def maxProfit(prices:List[int]) -> int :
    m_profit = 0
    for buy_point in range(len(prices)):
        for sell_point in range(buy_point+1, len(prices)):
            profit = prices[sell_point] - prices[buy_point]
            if profit > 0:
                profit = profit + maxProfit(prices[sell_point+1:])
                if profit > m_profit:
                    m_profit = profit
    return m_profit

2.2 valley peak

# valley peak
def max_profit(prices:List[int]) -> int :
    m_profit = 0
    valley = 0
    peak = 0
    i = 1
    length = len(prices)
    while i < length:
        while i < length and prices[i] < prices[i-1]:
            i = i + 1
        valley = prices[i-1]
        while i < length and prices[i] > prices[i-1]:
            i = i + 1
        peak = prices[i-1]
        profit = peak - valley
        if profit > m_profit:
            m_profit = profit
        i = i + 1
    return m_profit

2.3 increment

def max_profit(prices:List[int]) -> int :
    profit = 0
    for i in range(1, len(prices)):
        increment = prices[i] - prices[i-1]
        if increment > 0:
            profit = profit + increment
    return profit

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Reference

leetcode