[Leetcode 134, Medium] Gas Station

Problem: 

There are N gas stations along a circular route, where the amount of gas at station i is gas[i].

You have a car with an unlimited gas tank and it costs cost[i] of gas to travel from station i to its next station (i+1). You begin the journey with an empty tank at one of the gas stations.

Return the starting gas station's index if you can travel around the circuit once, otherwise return -1.

Note:
The solution is guaranteed to be unique.

Analysis: I did not find out the solution by myself. The solution can be described as follows. Suppose that the truck starts its journey from the i-th station, and at the j-th (j is not equal to i, and j may be smaller than i, since the journey is a circle), the remaining gas is not greater than 0. The truck cannot start from any station between i and j (include j). If not, we may assume the truck start the journy from a station k, i < k < j and it won't stop at j with negative remaining gas. Then, the truck will remain negative gas when it start from i and arrives at k, which contradicts with the truck stops at j with negative remain gas (this implies that the truck cannot stop at any station between i and j with nonnegative remaining gas). With this proof, we can have our code.

Solutions:

C++:

int canCompleteCircuit(vector<int> &gas, vector<int> &cost) {
        if(gas.size() == 0)
            return -1;
            
        for(int start = 0; start < gas.size();) {
            int sum = gas[start] -  cost[start];
            if(sum < 0)
                if(start == gas.size() - 1)
                    return -1;
                else {
                    ++start;
                    continue;
                }
                
            for(int pass = start + 1; pass != start; ++pass) {
                if(pass == gas.size())
                    pass -= gas.size();
                    
                sum += gas[pass] - cost[pass];
                if(sum < 0)
                    if(pass <= start)
                        return -1;
                    else {
                        start = pass + 1;
                        break;
                    }
                else if(start == pass + 1 || start == pass + 1 - gas.size())
                    return start;
            }
        }
        
        return -1;
    }

Java:

Python: