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.

思路

显然最笨方法是检索所有后项与前项之差，取最大值，其复杂度为O(n2)；

单由于观察到其顺序只能是从前到后，为单向的，所有我们思考能否将其复杂度降为O(n)；

设置一个变量temp，当遍历从头至尾的时候，每次检查后一项与前一项之差，与之前的temp加起来，就表示当前i位置的数与目前检索到的之前最小数的差，与0作比较避免出现负增长；遍历一遍取所有temp 的最大值即得出答案。

代码

public class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
        int max = 0;
        int temp = 0;
        for(int i = 1 ; i < prices.length ; ++ i){
            temp= Math.max(0, temp += prices[i] - prices[i-1]);
            max = Math.max(max , temp);
        }
        return max;
    }
}