Problem:
Given a string s, rearrange the characters of s so that any two adjacent characters are not the same.Return any possible rearrangement of s or return "" if not possible.

Intuition:
Use least frequent characters to fill the gap between most frequent characters.

Discussion:
The most frequent characters in the…

Problem:
Instruction for a robot movement
L : turn left, R: turn right, G: go straight for 1 step
Given sequence of instruction will be repeated indefinitely.

Goal: given a sequence of instructions, check if robot forming a cycle.

Intuition:
if after one scan of execution, the robot faces different direction than starting direction(north), then won’t form a cycle.
or if the starting position and the ending position is the same, it forms a cycle

Algorithm:
define four directions: [<(0, 1), north>, <(1, 0), east>, <(0, -1), south>, <(-1, 0), west>]
as we know the initial direction is always north, so use a variable to represent the direction, cur = 0, here 0 is the index in the direction array.
loop thru each instruction char, and change the cur accordingly
use (x, y) to represent position, and update the x, y when G is encountered.

Code:

Goal: Find the numbers of subarrays that sum up to k. Array is an int array and has duplicates and negative numbers.

Intuition:
when negative numbers are allowed, then we cannot use the sliding window method because we can’t decide the right boundary of the window. Thus, we need a way to guarantee the windows can be closed. So prefix sum is good approach since prefix[i] — prefix[j] == k is a fix window.

Algorithm:
Maintaining a hashmap storing <prefix sum: count>, similar to two sum approach, to check complement.
if prefix_sum_so_far == k: cnt++
if prefix_sum_so_far — k in the hashmap: cnt += hashmap[prefix_sum_so_far — k]
insert prefix_sum_so_far into hashmap

Code:

Goal:
Given an array of integers, count number of subarrays that have sums that are divisible by K, where 2 ≤ K ≤ 10000. The subarray size should be at least 1.

Intuition:
The naive way is to try all the subarrays in nested loops. That will take O(n³).
That is…

Goal:
Given an array of non-negative integers, find the lexicographically next permutation. If no such permutation, return the ascending order permutation.

Intuition:
1. Notice that non-increasing sequence does not have next greater permutation, and non-decreasing sequence is the smallest permutation.
2. …

Goal:
Given an array of non-negative integers which represent histograms with width of 1 and height of the integer value. Find the largest area of any consecutive histograms can form.

Intuition:
Max area must use one of the histogram as the height, thus we can calculate areas formed with every histogram…

Goal:
Given an integer array and window side of K, find the max values for every window in the array. Return the max values array.

Intuition: For window of size k ending with [i], the max of this window must ≥ [i] and must be within the window borders. …

Goal: find the size of shortest subarray in given array that sum up to at least K, where negative integer is allowed.
Reasoning for techniques used:
1. Prefix sum: Because negative number is allowed. This causes a problem that you don’t know when to stop expanding or shrinking the window. It’s…