465 Optimal Account Balancing

1. Question

A group of friends went on holiday and sometimes lent each other money. For example, Alice paid for Bill's lunch for $10. Then later Chris gave Alice $5 for a taxi ride. We can model each transaction as a tuple (x, y, z) which means person x gave person y $z. Assuming Alice, Bill, and Chris are person 0, 1, and 2 respectively (0, 1, 2 are the person's ID), the transactions can be represented as[[0, 1, 10], [2, 0, 5]].

Given a list of transactions between a group of people, return the minimum number of transactions required to settle the debt.

Note:

  1. A transaction will be given as a tuple (x, y, z). Note thatx ≠ yandz > 0.

  2. Person's IDs may not be linear, e.g. we could have the persons 0, 1, 2 or we could also have the persons 0, 2, 6.

Example 1:

Input: [[0,1,10], [2,0,5]]

Output: 2

Explanation:
Person #0 gave person #1 $10.
Person #2 gave person #0 $5.

Two transactions are needed. One way to settle the debt is person #1 pays person #0 and #2 $5 each.

Example 2:

2. Implementation

(1) Hash Table + Backtracking

思路:

(1)用hashmap预处理transaction,将balance为0的人去除掉

(2)用backtracking对枚举出所有能将剩余debt settle的组合,

(2) HashMap + Two Pointers + Backtracking

思路: 这里和上面解法唯一的不同的是在第二步里,我们进行进一步的预处理,用two pointers的方法去除掉可以直接match的debt

3. Time & Space Complexity

(1) Hash Table + Backtracking: 时间复杂度O(n!), n是debt不为0的个数,空间复杂度O(m + n), m是人的个数

(2) HashMap + Two Pointers + Backtracking:时间复杂度O(n!), 空间复杂度O(m + n)

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