LeBlanc’s law: "Later equals never".
Summary Bit manipulation is all about tricks. bitset is also a common data structure in set problems. Details Bitwise Not Flip Last Set Bit The last set bit is the rightmost set bit. i&(i-1) does the trick to reset that bit. It is commonly used in Binary Indexed Tree (BIT). (i-1) flips all the bits…
LC 1453. Maximum Number of Darts Inside of a Circular Dartboard Given 2 points and 1 radius, there will be 2 or 1 or 0 circles where the 2 points are at the boundary. When dist(p0, p1)>2r, there will be 0 circles. The difficulty is how to get the center of the circle in clean…
Summary In some problems, the index i is not enough to make subproblems alg[i] independent to the previous sequences s[0,i-1]. We need one or several extra states to make subproblem self-contained. The intuition is: if we brute force the problem, there might be many duplicate visitings. For example, two different dfs enter the same index…
Summary Usually, the monotonic queue can be used in the following situations. Next Greater/Greatest: find the first larger or smaller element (or the largest or smallest element) from the current index to the very right index; Sliding Window Max: find the smallest or largest value in a sliding window Length s.t. Max: find the longest…
Summary In this category, given a range alg[i,j], the subproblem is usually reduced to alg[i+1,j], alg[i,j-1], or alg[i+1,j-1] according to the properties of boundaries i and j.
Summary In this category, given a range alg[i,j], the subproblem is not self contained. To make the subproblem independent to outer ranges, some extra states need to be added.
Summary In this category, given a range alg[i,j], we need to identify a middle point k and change the problem into alg[i,k] and alg[k+1, j]. Details LC 375. Guess Number Higher or Lower II Once we identify this problem as a DP problem, it is not difficult. Given a number from 1 to n, actually…
Summary A typical sliding window problem requires the longest or shortest subarray which satisfies certain constraints. The constraint must satisfy a monotonic property: as the right end of the window increases, the left end won’t decrease. If the constrain is related to maximum or minimum, we could use Monotonic Queues, which are perfect data structures…