Leetcode Algorithms - Dynamic Programming：121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Description

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.

代码

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        if (prices.size() == 0)
            return 0;
        int minExpenseSoFar = prices[0], maxProfitSoFar = 0;
        for (int i = 1; i < prices.size(); i++) {
            if (prices[i] <= minExpenseSoFar)
                minExpenseSoFar = prices[i];
            else
                maxProfitSoFar = max(maxProfitSoFar, prices[i] - minExpenseSoFar);
        }
        return maxProfitSoFar;
    }
};

分析

这道题比较简单。一开始想到了暴力求解，用d(i,j)表示第i天买入、第j天抛出的收益，只需要进行for循环找出最大的d(i,j)即可，但是超时了。
观察发现，买入的股票价格应该尽可能低，抛出价格应该尽可能高；而且买入的时机不固定，所以需要比较多种情况，取最大值。可以使用一次循环进行完所有比较，最后的算法思想参照代码。
之所以会在开始判断prices的大小是否为0，是因为发现输入数组会有空的情况，一开始没想到… …