LeetCode - Unique Binary Search Trees

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Problem description

description

Given n, how many structurally unique BST’s (binary search trees) that store values 1 … n?

Example:

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Input: 3
Output: 5
Explanation:
Given n = 3, there are a total of 5 unique BST's:

   1         3     3      2      1
    \       /     /      / \      \
     3     2     1      1   3      2
    /     /       \                 \
   2     1         2                 3

Analysis

Basically, we can use dp to solve this question based on these observations.

  1. for n nodes, we need to separate n into three parts, 0 to i-1, i, i+1 to n, for i from 1 to n-1.

  2. for i from 1 to n-1 part, the relative order of these nodes are the same. So the number of unique BST trees are only determined by the nodes amount.

So we have

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for (int j = 1; j <= i; j++){
    dp[i] += dp[j-1] * dp[i-j];               
}

And the solution:

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class Solution {
    public int numTrees(int n) {
        int[] dp = new int[n+1];
        
        dp[0] = 1;
        dp[1] = 1;
        
        for (int i = 2; i < n+1; i++){
            for (int j = 1; j <= i; j++){
                dp[i] += dp[j-1] * dp[i-j];               
            }
        }
        
        return dp[n];
    }
}

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