LeetCode - Pascal's Triangle

题注

这道题让我怀念起了小学华罗庚学校上课的日子… 题目不难，来看一下吧~

题目

Given numRows, generate the first numRows of Pascal's triangle.
For example, given numRows = 5, Return

[
     [1],
    [1,1],
   [1,2,1],
  [1,3,3,1],
 [1,4,6,4,1]
]

分析

首先，我们了解一下什么是Pascal's Triangle[1]，不过相信大家都不太陌生啦。

In mathematics, Pascal's triangle is a triangular array of the binomial coefficients. It is named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in much of the Western world, although other mathematicians studied it centuries before him in India,[1] Greece, Iran, China, Germany, and Italy.

The rows of Pascal's triangle are conventionally enumerated starting with row n = 0 at the top. The entries in each row are numbered from the left beginning with k = 0 and are usually staggered relative to the numbers in the adjacent rows. A simple construction of the triangle proceeds in the following manner. On row 0, write only the number 1. Then, to construct the elements of following rows, add the number above and to the left with the number above and to the right to find the new value. If either the number to the right or left is not present, substitute a zero in its place. For example, the first number in the first row is 0 + 1 = 1, whereas the numbers 1 and 3 in the third row are added to produce the number 4 in the fourth row.

实际上，如果用组合数进行求解，代码将会非常简单，但是效率很低… 因此，我们还是应该按照Pascal's Triangle的定义来逐行的构造。

在实现过程中要注意的有这么几点：

1. 注意数组行和列的具体关系。对于第i行，一共有i个元素，第一个元素为1，第i个元素也为1，其余是上方一行两数相加。在实现时，容易算错行和列，需要特别注意。

2. 注意极限情况。比如输入num = 0 或者输入num = 1的时候，尤其要注意。

代码

public class Solution {
    public ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>> generate(int numRows) {
        ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>> resultList = new ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>>();
        for (int i=0; i<numRows; i++){
            //Generate Pascal's Triangle for line i, which has i+1 numbers
            ArrayList<Integer> iList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
            iList.add(1);
            if (i == 0){
                resultList.add(iList);
                continue;
            }
            ArrayList<Integer> i_1List = resultList.get(i-1);
            for (int j=1; j<i; j++){
                iList.add(i_1List.get(j-1) + i_1List.get(j));
            }
            iList.add(1);
            resultList.add(iList);
        }
        return resultList;
    }
}