LeetCode - Gas Station
Problem description
There are N gas stations along a circular route, where the amount of gas at station i is gas[i].
You have a car with an unlimited gas tank and it costs cost[i] of gas to travel from station i to its next station (i+1). You begin the journey with an empty tank at one of the gas stations.
Return the starting gas station’s index if you can travel around the circuit once in the clockwise direction, otherwise return -1.
Note:
- If there exists a solution, it is guaranteed to be unique.
- Both input arrays are non-empty and have the same length.
- Each element in the input arrays is a non-negative integer.
Example 1:
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Input:
gas = [1,2,3,4,5]
cost = [3,4,5,1,2]
Output: 3
Explanation:
Start at station 3 (index 3) and fill up with 4 unit of gas. Your tank = 0 + 4 = 4
Travel to station 4. Your tank = 4 - 1 + 5 = 8
Travel to station 0. Your tank = 8 - 2 + 1 = 7
Travel to station 1. Your tank = 7 - 3 + 2 = 6
Travel to station 2. Your tank = 6 - 4 + 3 = 5
Travel to station 3. The cost is 5. Your gas is just enough to travel back to station 3.
Therefore, return 3 as the starting index.
Example 2:
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Input:
gas = [2,3,4]
cost = [3,4,3]
Output: -1
Explanation:
You can't start at station 0 or 1, as there is not enough gas to travel to the next station.
Let's start at station 2 and fill up with 4 unit of gas. Your tank = 0 + 4 = 4
Travel to station 0. Your tank = 4 - 3 + 2 = 3
Travel to station 1. Your tank = 3 - 3 + 3 = 3
You cannot travel back to station 2, as it requires 4 unit of gas but you only have 3.
Therefore, you can't travel around the circuit once no matter where you start.
Analysis
The first thought is to use DP, we can know that if we start from 0, if we can reach to 1 but failed to reach 0 again. Then we can know that 0 can’t be the start. Additionally, we can know that 1 should be the start. Since we can from 0 to 1, then when the car is in postion 1, it must has oil, which means remain > 0. And the car start from 1 with remain >0 failed to go to position 0, then if we start from 1 with remain == 0, we can’t go to position 1.
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class Solution {
public int canCompleteCircuit(int[] gas, int[] cost) {
int len = gas.length;
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++){
int v = 0;
int offset = 0;
while (v >= 0){
if (offset == len){
return i;
}
v+=gas[(i+offset)%len]-cost[(i+offset)%len];
offset++;
}
i = i + offset - 1;
}
return -1;
}
}
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