LeetCode 244. Shortest Word Distance II

This is a follow up of Shortest Word Distance. The only difference is now you are given the list of words and your method will be called repeatedly many times with different parameters. How would you optimize it?

Design a class which receives a list of words in the constructor, and implements a method that takes two words word1 and word2 and return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.

For example,
Assume that words = [“practice”, “makes”, “perfect”, “coding”, “makes”].

Given word1 = “coding”, word2 = “practice”, return 3.
Given word1 = “makes”, word2 = “coding”, return 1.

Note:
You may assume that word1 does not equal to word2, and word1 and word2 are both in the list.

思路：
1. 和I,III比较，需要重复多次的调用。如何优化？肯定要对给的word list做预处理，比如把每个单词和出现的位置的对应关系存放map内。当计算距离时，先把两个单词的出现位置对于的vector查找出来，然后只需比较这两个vector内数字差的最小值。

class WordDistance {
public:
    WordDistance(vector<string>& words) {
        for(int i=0;i<words.size();i++)
            mm[words[i]].push_back(i);

    }

    int shortest(string word1, string word2) {
        vector<int> pos1=mm[word1];
        vector<int> pos2=mm[word2];
        int i=0,j=0,res=INT_MAX;
        while(i<pos1.size()&&j<pos2.size()){//o(m+n)的复杂度，而不是o(mn),因为我们遍历两个数组的目标是找两个数组数之差的最小值，所以可以用两个数的大小关系来看决定每次是增加i还是增加j，也就是i和j是相关的，而不是独立的；当我们不去explore两个数的相关性，即：睁眼却看不见本来相关的数据，就会做很多无用的比较，最后就是把复杂度从o(m+n)变成o(mn)
            res=min(res,abs(pos1[i]-pos2[j]));
            if(pos1[i]>pos2[j])
                j++;
            else
                i++;
        }
        return res;
    }

private:
    unordered_map<string, vector<int> > mm;
};