LeetCode #416: Partition Equal Subset Sum

Problem Statement

(Source) Given a non-empty array containing only positive integers, find if the array can be partitioned into two subsets such that the sum of elements in both subsets is equal.

Note:

• Each of the array element will not exceed 100.
• The array size will not exceed 200.

Example 1:

Input: [1, 5, 11, 5]

Output: true

Explanation: The array can be partitioned as [1, 5, 5] and [11].

Example 2:

Input: [1, 2, 3, 5]

Output: false

Explanation: The array cannot be partitioned into equal sum subsets.

Solution

There exists various solutions for this question, of which a decent one is using DFS. As we can know easily, if the sum of the input array is odd, it cannot be partitioned into two subsets with equal subset sum. If the sum of the input array is even, then the main idea to solve this problem is as follows:

• Set a variable target as the target we aim to achieve.
• Choose from the array nums an element one by one and see the remaining elements starting from the current chosen position can make us achieve target - nums[i] as the new target. The reason that we can just consider the remaining elements is a form of pruning (eliminating redundant computation ). To make thing faster, we can sort nums at the beginning in descending order.

class Solution(object):
    def canPartition(self, nums):
        """
        :type nums: List[int]
        :rtype: bool
        """
        nums.sort(reverse=True)
        def helper(start, target):
            if target < 0:
                return
            elif target == 0:
                return True
            else:
                return any(helper(i + 1, target - nums[i]) for i in xrange(start, len(nums)))
        return False if sum(nums) % 2 else helper(0, sum(nums) >> 1)

TODO

Try to solve it using Dynamic Programming.