Description
You have a total of n coins that you want to form in a staircase shape, where every k-th row must have exactly k coins.
Given n, find the total number of full staircase rows that can be formed.
n is a non-negative integer and fits within the range of a 32-bit signed integer.
Example
n = 5 The coins can form the following rows: ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ Because the 3rd row is incomplete, we return 2.
Analysis
For this problem, I want to use binary search to solve this problem, so we need tow pointers: left and right. The target is that we need find the min value m to achive (1+m)*m/2 < n. let me show my code:
class Solution(object):
def arrangeCoins(self,n):
"""
type: n int
rtype: int
"""
left, right = 0, n+1
while left < right:
mid = left + (right - left)/2
if (1 + mid) * mid / 2 <= n:
mid = left + 1
else: mid = right
return left - 1