Suppose we have a list of intervals in the form [start, end], this is representing the start and end time of a course. We have to find the maximum number of courses we can take, assuming we can only take one course at a time and the start of a course needs to be later than the end of the last course.
So, if the input is like times = [[3, 6],[6, 9],[7, 8],[9, 11]], then the output will be 3, as we can take courses [[3, 6], [7, 8], [9, 11]]
To solve this, we will follow these steps:
sort time based on ending time
counter := 0, end := -1
for i in range 0 to size of times, do
if times[i, 0] > end is non-zero, then
counter := counter + 1
end := times[i, 1]
return counter
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding:
Example
class Solution: def solve(self, times): times.sort(key=lambda x: x[1]) counter = 0 end = -1 for i in range(len(times)): if times[i][0] > end: counter += 1 end = times[i][1] return counter ob = Solution() times = [ [3, 6], [6, 9], [7, 8], [9, 11] ] print(ob.solve(times))
Input
[ [3, 6],[6, 9],[7, 8],[9, 11]]
Output
3