Leetcode Algorithms - Dynamic Programming：746. Min Cost Climbing Stairs

Description

On a staircase, the i-th step has some non-negative cost cost[i] assigned (0 indexed).

Once you pay the cost, you can either climb one or two steps. You need to find minimum cost to reach the top of the floor, and you can either start from the step with index 0, or the step with index 1.

Example 1:
Input: cost = [10, 15, 20]
Output: 15
Explanation: Cheapest is start on cost[1], pay that cost and go to the top.
Example 2:
Input: cost = [1, 100, 1, 1, 1, 100, 1, 1, 100, 1]
Output: 6
Explanation: Cheapest is start on cost[0], and only step on 1s, skipping cost[3].

Note: cost will have a length in the range [2, 1000].
Every cost[i] will be an integer in the range [0, 999].

代码

class Solution {
public:
    int minCostClimbingStairs(vector<int>& cost) {
        int minOneStepBelow = 0, minEndingHere = 0;
        for (int i = 2; i <= cost.size(); i++) {
            int curMin = min(minEndingHere + cost[i - 1], minOneStepBelow + cost[i - 2]);
            minOneStepBelow = minEndingHere;
            minEndingHere = curMin;
        }
        return minEndingHere;
    }
};

分析

这道题是将每个i看成一个状态，然后定义状态的指标函数d(i)为到第i级阶梯的最小成本。d(i)也可以定义为从i往上的最小成本，但是在最小和问题时使用了这种思路，所以这次就换一个方法。
需要注意的是第0级和第1级阶梯的d(i)为0，因为可以从这两级开始。
因为一次可以爬一级阶梯或两级阶梯，所以需要对两种选择的成本进行计算，取较小值。成本计算的方法是d(i)+cost(i)。
假设总共有k级阶梯，需要计算到d(k+1)，因为要爬到顶层，即爬到第k+1级阶梯。而d(i+1)就是问题的解。

程序中使用了一个for循环来求解。用两个变量minEndingHere和minOneStepBelow分别表示爬到当前阶梯的最小成本和爬到比当前阶梯低一级的最小成本，以方便进行往上爬时成本的比较。遍历时计算当前最小代价并赋值给minEndingHere，将旧值赋给minOneStepBelow。遍历结束后，minEndingHere就是问题的解。