Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock III

题目：

Say you have an array 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 at most two transactions.

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

分析：

Comparing to I and II, III limits the number of transactions to 2. This can be solve by "devide and conquer". We use left[i] to track the maximum profit for transactions before i, and use right[i] to track the maximum profit for transactions after i. You can use the following example to understand the Java solution:

Prices: 1 4 5 7 6 3 2 9
left = [0, 3, 4, 6, 6, 6, 6, 8]
right= [8, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 0]

赞！！！人家都是怎么想出来这么巧妙的解法的呢？？？

参考代码：

http://www.programcreek.com/2014/02/leetcode-best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock-iii-java/

public class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
    	if (prices == null || prices.length < 2) {
    		return 0;
    	}
     
    	//highest profit in 0 ... i
    	int[] left = new int[prices.length];
    	int[] right = new int[prices.length];
     
    	// DP from left to right
    	left[0] = 0; 
    	int min = prices[0];
    	for (int i = 1; i < prices.length; i++) {
    		min = Math.min(min, prices[i]);
    		left[i] = Math.max(left[i - 1], prices[i] - min);
    	}
     
    	// DP from right to left
    	right[prices.length - 1] = 0;
    	int max = prices[prices.length - 1];
    	for (int i = prices.length - 2; i >= 0; i--) {
    		max = Math.max(max, prices[i]);
    		right[i] = Math.max(right[i + 1], max - prices[i]);
    	}
     
    	int profit = 0;
    	for (int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++) {
    		profit = Math.max(profit, left[i] + right[i]);
    	}
     
    	return profit;
    }
}