Given an n x n integer matrix grid, return the minimum sum of a falling path with non-zero shifts.
A falling path with non-zero shifts is a choice of exactly one element from each row of grid such that no two elements chosen in adjacent rows are in the same column.
Example 1:
Input: grid = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
Output: 13
Explanation:
The possible falling paths are:
[1,5,9], [1,5,7], [1,6,7], [1,6,8],
[2,4,8], [2,4,9], [2,6,7], [2,6,8],
[3,4,8], [3,4,9], [3,5,7], [3,5,9]
The falling path with the smallest sum is [1,5,7], so the answer is 13.
Example 2:
Input: grid = [[7]]
Output: 7
Constraints:
n == grid.length == grid[i].length
1 <= n <= 200
-99 <= grid[i][j] <= 99
Solutions
Solution 1: Dynamic Programming
We define \(f[i][j]\) to represent the minimum sum of the first \(i\) rows, with the last number in the \(j\)-th column. The state transition equation is:
where \(k\) represents the column of the number in the \((i - 1)\)-th row, and the number in the \(i\)-th row and \(j\)-th column is \(grid[i - 1][j]\).
The final answer is the minimum value in \(f[n]\).
The time complexity is \(O(n^3)\), and the space complexity is \(O(n^2)\). Here, \(n\) is the number of rows in the matrix.
We note that the state \(f[i][j]\) only depends on \(f[i - 1][k]\), so we can use a rolling array to optimize the space complexity to \(O(n)\).