LeetCode 481. Magical String

Problem Statement

(Source) A magical string S consists of only ‘1’ and ‘2’ and obeys the following rules:

The string S is magical because concatenating the number of contiguous occurrences of characters ‘1’ and ‘2’ generates the string S itself.

The first few elements of string S is the following: S = “1221121221221121122……”

If we group the consecutive ‘1’s and ‘2’s in S, it will be:

1 22 11 2 1 22 1 22 11 2 11 22 ……

and the occurrences of ‘1’s or ‘2’s in each group are:

1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 ……

You can see that the occurrence sequence above is the S itself.

Given an integer N as input, return the number of ‘1’s in the first N number in the magical string S.

Note: N will not exceed 100,000.

Example 1:

Input: 6
Output: 3
Explanation: The first 6 elements of magical string S is "12211" and it contains three 1's, so return 3.

Solution

class Solution(object):
    def magicalString(self, n):
        """
        :type n: int
        :rtype: int
        """
        if n == 0:
            return 0

        count = 1
        a = [0] * n
        a[0] = 1
        b = [0] * n
        b[0] = 1
        i, j = 1, 1
        while i < n:
            x = a[i-1] ^ 3
            a[i] = x
            count += int(x == 1)
            i += 1
            b[j] = a[j]
            if b[j] == 2 and i < n:
                a[i] = x
                count += int(x == 1)
                i += 1
            j += 1
        return count