solution_452

LeetCode Problem Description

There are a number of spherical balloons spread in two-dimensional space. For each balloon, provided input is the start and end coordinates of the horizontal diameter. Since it’s horizontal, y-coordinates don’t matter and hence the x-coordinates of start and end of the diameter suffice. Start is always smaller than end. There will be at most 104 balloons.

An arrow can be shot up exactly vertically from different points along the x-axis. A balloon with xstart and xend bursts by an arrow shot at x if xstart ≤ x ≤ xend. There is no limit to the number of arrows that can be shot. An arrow once shot keeps travelling up infinitely. The problem is to find the minimum number of arrows that must be shot to burst all balloons.

Example:

Input:
[[10,16], [2,8], [1,6], [7,12]]

Output:
2

Explanation:
One way is to shoot one arrow for example at x = 6 (bursting the balloons [2,8] and [1,6]) and another arrow at x = 11 (bursting the other two balloons).

Solution

In my opinion, I sort the array first and then merge the balloons as one entry with stricter and smaller range. Here is my solution following:

class Solution {
public:
    int findMinArrowShots(vector<pair<int, int>>& points) {
        vector<pair<int, int>> temp = points;
        int min = temp.size();
        if (points.empty()) {
            return min;
        }
        sort(temp.begin(), temp.end());
        vector<pair<int, int>>::iterator current = temp.begin();
        for (vector<pair<int, int>>::iterator it = temp.begin(); it != temp.end(); it++) {
            if (current->second >= it->first) {
                min--;
                current->first = it->first;
                current->second = current->second >= it->second ? it->second : current->second;
            }
            else {
                current = it;
            }
        }
        return ++min;
    }
};

As we can see, I first set the number of the arrows be the same as the number of the balloons. Then if I find a balloon that can be bursted with other balloons, I will decrease the number of the arrows. And note that since I compare the first element of the vector itself first, so that the final value of the variable min will be one less than the result we want. So we need to add one more to the min variable and then return it.