You are given an array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the ith day.
Find the maximum profit you can achieve. You may complete at most two transactions.
Note: You may not engage in multiple transactions simultaneously (i.e., you must sell the stock before you buy again).
Example 1:
Input: prices = [3,3,5,0,0,3,1,4]
Output: 6
Explanation: Buy on day 4 (price = 0) and sell on day 6 (price = 3), profit = 3-0 = 3.
Then buy on day 7 (price = 1) and sell on day 8 (price = 4), profit = 4-1 = 3.
Example 2:
Input: prices = [1,2,3,4,5]
Output: 4
Explanation: Buy on day 1 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4.
Note that you cannot buy on day 1, buy on day 2 and sell them later, as you are engaging multiple transactions at the same time. You must sell before buying again.
Example 3:
Input: prices = [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.
Constraints:
1 <= prices.length <= 105
0 <= prices[i] <= 105
Solutions
Solution 1: Dynamic Programming
We define the following variables:
f1 represents the maximum profit after the first purchase of the stock;
f2 represents the maximum profit after the first sale of the stock;
f3 represents the maximum profit after the second purchase of the stock;
f4 represents the maximum profit after the second sale of the stock.
During the traversal, we directly calculate f1, f2, f3, f4. We consider that buying and selling on the same day will result in a profit of $0$, which will not affect the answer.
Finally, return f4.
The time complexity is $O(n)$, where $n$ is the length of the prices array. The space complexity is $O(1)$.