664. Strange Printer
Description
There is a strange printer with the following two special properties:
- The printer can only print a sequence of the same character each time.
- At each turn, the printer can print new characters starting from and ending at any place and will cover the original existing characters.
Given a string s
, return the minimum number of turns the printer needed to print it.
Example 1:
Input: s = "aaabbb" Output: 2 Explanation: Print "aaa" first and then print "bbb".
Example 2:
Input: s = "aba" Output: 2 Explanation: Print "aaa" first and then print "b" from the second place of the string, which will cover the existing character 'a'.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 100
s
consists of lowercase English letters.
Solutions
Solution 1: Dynamic Programming
We define $f[i][j]$ as the minimum operations to print $s[i..j]$, with the initial value $f[i][j]=\infty$, and the answer is $f[0][n-1]$, where $n$ is the length of string $s$.
Consider $f[i][j]$, if $s[i] = s[j]$, we can print $s[j]$ when print $s[i]$, so we can ignore $s[j]$ and continue to print $s[i+1..j-1]$. If $s[i] \neq s[j]$, we need to print the substring separately, i.e. $s[i..k]$ and $s[k+1..j]$, where $k \in [i,j)$. So we can have the following transition equation:
$$ f[i][j]= \begin{cases} 1, & \textit{if } i=j \ f[i][j-1], & \textit{if } s[i]=s[j] \ \min_{i \leq k < j} {f[i][k]+f[k+1][j]}, & \textit{otherwise} \end{cases} $$
We can enumerate $i$ from large to small and $j$ from small to large, so that we can ensure that $f[i][j-1]$, $f[i][k]$ and $f[k+1][j]$ have been calculated when we calculate $f[i][j]$.
The time complexity is $O(n^3)$ and the space complexity is $O(n^2)$. Where $n$ is the length of string $s$.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 |
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 |
|