Matchsticks to Square
You are given an integer array matchsticks
where matchsticks[i]
is the length of the ith
matchstick. You want to use all the matchsticks to make one square. You should not break any stick, but you can link them up, and each matchstick must be used exactly one time.
Return true
if you can make this square and false
otherwise.
Example 1:
Input: matchsticks = [1,1,2,2,2]
Output: true
Explanation: You can form a square with length 2, one side of the square came two sticks with length 1.
Example 2:
Input: matchsticks = [3,3,3,3,4]
Output: false
Explanation: You cannot find a way to form a square with all the matchsticks.
Constraints:
1 <= matchsticks.length <= 15
1 <= matchsticks[i] <= 108
Solution
We are looking to build four sides of the same length, and we can easily calculate the target side length by sum(matchsticks)//4
.
Then we can solve this problem by trying to put each matchstick on the four different sides, and see if we can reach a solution.
We can apply the backtracking2 template for aggregation, as we are only asked to find whether a solution exists.
Let's fill in the logic.
is_leaf
:start_index == len(matchsticks)
, when we have used all of the matchsticks.get_edges
: we can put a match stick on four different sides.is_valid
:sides[i] + matchsticks[start_index] <= side_length
, the choice is valid only when the newside[i]
length will not exceedside_length
.- additinal states:
sides
that stores the current length of the four sides.
Implementation
1def makesquare(self, matchsticks: List[int]) -> bool:
2 if sum(matchsticks) % 4 != 0: return False
3 side_length = sum(matchsticks) // 4
4 matchsticks.sort(reverse=True)
5 sides = [0, 0, 0, 0]
6 def dfs(start_index):
7 if start_index == len(matchsticks):
8 return side_length == sides[0] == sides[1] == sides[2] == sides[3]
9
10 for i in range(4):
11 if sides[i] + matchsticks[start_index] <= side_length:
12 sides[i] += matchsticks[start_index]
13 if dfs(start_index + 1): return True
14 sides[i] -= matchsticks[start_index]
15 return False
16 return dfs(0)
A person thinks of a number between 1 and 1000. You may ask any number questions to them, provided that the question can be answered with either "yes" or "no".
What is the minimum number of questions you needed to ask so that you are guaranteed to know the number that the person is thinking?
Solution Implementation
A heap is a ...?
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