Problem Description:
You are playing the following Flip Game with your friend: Given a string that contains only these two characters: + and -, you and your friend take turns to flip two consecutive "++" into "--". The game ends when a person can no longer make a move and therefore the other person will be the winner.
Write a function to determine if the starting player can guarantee a win.
For example, given s = "++++", return true. The starting player can guarantee a win by flipping the middle "++" to become "+--+".
Follow up:
Derive your algorithm's runtime complexity.
The simplest solution that I have found is here (refer to the first paragraph for explanations of the idea and the Java code). I rewrite it in C++.
The idea is very straightforward: if you can make s non-winnable by a move, then you will win.
1 class Solution { 2 public: 3 bool canWin(string s) { 4 for (int i = -1; (i = s.find("++", i + 1)) >= 0; ) 5 if (!canWin(s.substr(0, i) + '-' + s.substr(i+2))) 6 return true; 7 return false; 8 } 9 };
If you are interested to learn more, this post shares a more sophisticated solution using game theory (it reduces the running time to 0 seconds!). The code is restructured as below.
1 class Solution { 2 public: 3 bool canWin(string s) { 4 vector<int> states = gameStates(s); 5 if (states.empty()) return false; 6 return spragueGrundy(states) != 0; 7 } 8 private: 9 vector<int> gameStates(string& s) { 10 vector<int> states; 11 int n = s.length(), c = 0; 12 for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) { 13 if (s[i] == '+') c++; 14 if (i == n - 1 || s[i] == '-') { 15 if (c >= 2) states.push_back(c); 16 c = 0; 17 } 18 } 19 return states; 20 } 21 int firstMissingNumber(unordered_set<int>& st) { 22 int m = st.size(); 23 for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) 24 if (!st.count(i)) return i; 25 return m; 26 } 27 int spragueGrundy(vector<int>& states) { 28 int m = *max_element(states.begin(), states.end()); 29 vector<int> sg(m + 1, 0); 30 for (int l = 2; l <= m; l++) { 31 unordered_set<int> st; 32 for (int l1 = 0; l1 < l / 2; l1++) { 33 int l2 = l - l1 - 2; 34 st.insert(sg[l1] ^ sg[l2]); 35 } 36 sg[l] = firstMissingNumber(st); 37 } 38 int v = 0; 39 for (int state : states) v ^= sg[state]; 40 return v; 41 } 42 };