You have 4 cards each containing a number from 1 to 9. You need to judge whether they could operated through *, /, +, -, (, ) to get the value of 24.
Example 1:
Input: [4, 1, 8, 7]
Output: True
Explanation: (8-4) * (7-1) = 24
Example 2:
Input: [1, 2, 1, 2]
Output: False
Note:
The division operator / represents real division, not integer division. For example, 4 / (1 - 2/3) = 12.
Every operation done is between two numbers. In particular, we cannot use - as a unary operator. For example, with [1, 1, 1, 1] as input, the expression -1 - 1 - 1 - 1 is not allowed.
You cannot concatenate numbers together. For example, if the input is [1, 2, 1, 2], we cannot write this as 12 + 12.
Intuition and Algorithm:
There are only 4 cards and only 4 operations that can be performed. Even when all operations do not commute, that gives us an upper bound of 12 * 6 * 2 * 4 * 4 * 4 = 921612∗6∗2∗4∗4∗4=9216 possibilities, which makes it feasible to just try them all. Specifically, we choose two numbers (with order) in 12 ways and perform one of 4 operations (12 * 4). Then, with 3 remaining numbers, we choose 2 of them and perform one of 4 operations (6 * 4). Finally we have two numbers left and make a final choice of 2 * 4 possibilities.
We will perform 3 binary operations (+, -, *, / are the operations) on either our numbers or resulting numbers. Because - and / do not commute, we must be careful to consider both a / b and b / a.
For every way to remove two numbers a, b in our list, and for each possible result they can make, like a+b, a/b, etc., we will recursively solve the problem on this smaller list of numbers.
class Solution {
public boolean judgePoint24(int[] nums) {
ArrayList A = new ArrayList<Double>();
for (int v: nums)
A.add((double) v);
return solve(A);
}
private boolean solve(ArrayList<Double> nums) {
if (nums.size() == 0) return false;
if (nums.size() == 1) return Math.abs(nums.get(0) - 24) < 1e-6;
for (int i = 0; i < nums.size(); i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < nums.size(); j++) {
if (i != j) {
ArrayList<Double> nums2 = new ArrayList<Double>();
for (int k = 0; k < nums.size(); k++)
if (k != i && k != j) {
nums2.add(nums.get(k));
}
for (int k = 0; k < 4; k++) {
if (k < 2 && j > i)
continue;
if (k == 0) nums2.add(nums.get(i) + nums.get(j));
if (k == 1) nums2.add(nums.get(i) * nums.get(j));
if (k == 2) nums2.add(nums.get(i) - nums.get(j));
if (k == 3) {
if (nums.get(j) != 0) {
nums2.add(nums.get(i) / nums.get(j));
} else {
continue;
}
}
if (solve(nums2))
return true;
nums2.remove(nums2.size() - 1);
}
}
}
}
return false;
}
}