LeetCode121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

题目

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Example 1:
Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]
Output: 5

max. difference = 6-1 = 5 (not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price)
Example 2:
Input: [7, 6, 4, 3, 1]
Output: 0
In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

超时答案

两次循环，由于只能在买入后再卖出，对于每一天的价格向后搜索，记录差值最大的。W(n) = O(n²)

class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
        int max = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++) {
            for (int j = i; j < prices.length; j++) {
                if (prices[j] - prices[i] > max) max = prices[j] - prices[i];
            }
        }
        return max;
    }
}

正确答案

维护一个最小买入价格，由于必须后树减前树，所以最大利润一定出现在当前最小买入价格之后的最大卖出价格。关键在于理解卖出在买入之后的顺序问题。W(n) = O(n)

class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
        int max = 0, minPrice = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
        for (int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++) {
            if (prices[i] < minPrice) minPrice = prices[i];
            if (prices[i] - minPrice > max) max = prices[i] - minPrice;
        }
        return max;
    }
}