Maximum Gap

Given an unsorted array, find the maximum difference between the successive elements in its sorted form.

Try to solve it in linear time/space.

Return 0 if the array contains less than 2 elements.

You may assume all elements in the array are non-negative integers and fit in the 32-bit signed integer range.

题意：给定一个未排序的数组，返回其排序后的数组中 相邻元素之差 最大的值。

比如给定：[5,9,8,3,15]

排序后为：[3,5,8,9,15]，相邻元素之差最大的是15-9=6，返回6。

复杂度要求：时间空间均为O(n)。

Suppose there are N elements in the array, the min value is min and the max value is max. Then the maximum gap will be no smaller than ceiling[(max - min ) / (N - 1)].

Let gap = ceiling[(max - min ) / (N - 1)]. We divide all numbers in the array into n-1 buckets, where k-th bucket contains all numbers in [min + (k-1)gap, min + k*gap). Since there are n-2 numbers that are not equal min or max and there are n-1 buckets, at least one of the buckets are empty. We only need to store the largest number and the smallest number in each bucket.

After we put all the numbers into the buckets. We can scan the buckets sequentially and get the max gap.

public class Solution {
    public int maximumGap(int[] num) {
        if (num == null || num.length < 2)
            return 0;
        // get the max and min value of the array
        int min = num[0];
        int max = num[0];
        for (int i:num) {
            min = Math.min(min, i);
            max = Math.max(max, i);
        }
        // the minimum possibale gap, ceiling of the integer division
        int gap = (int)Math.ceil((double)(max - min)/(num.length - 1));
        int[] bucketsMIN = new int[num.length - 1]; // store the min value in that bucket
        int[] bucketsMAX = new int[num.length - 1]; // store the max value in that bucket
        Arrays.fill(bucketsMIN, Integer.MAX_VALUE);
        Arrays.fill(bucketsMAX, Integer.MIN_VALUE);
        // put numbers into buckets
        for (int i:num) {
            if (i == min || i == max)
                continue;
            int idx = (i - min) / gap; // index of the right position in the buckets
            bucketsMIN[idx] = Math.min(i, bucketsMIN[idx]);
            bucketsMAX[idx] = Math.max(i, bucketsMAX[idx]);
        }
        // scan the buckets for the max gap
        int maxGap = Integer.MIN_VALUE;
        int previous = min;
        for (int i = 0; i < num.length - 1; i++) {
            if (bucketsMIN[i] == Integer.MAX_VALUE && bucketsMAX[i] == Integer.MIN_VALUE)
                // empty bucket
                continue;
            // min value minus the previous value is the current gap
            maxGap = Math.max(maxGap, bucketsMIN[i] - previous);
            // update previous bucket value
            previous = bucketsMAX[i];
        }
        maxGap = Math.max(maxGap, max - previous); // updata the final max value gap
        return maxGap;
    }
}