Frog Jump - Coding Ninjas

Code 360 by Coding Ninjaswww.codingninjas.com

This is also similar to Climbing stairs problem. The constraints are same except here there is a cost /energy associated with each jump. And the stairs index start from 1.

We need to find out what is the minimum amount of enery required for reaching the last step or $n^{th}$step.

Intuition

We cannot go with greedy method as it optimizes for local maxima and not global maxima

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import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;


public class Solution {

    public static int frogJump(int n, int heights[]) {
        // n -> number of stairs to climb
        // Time Complexity: O(n), to traverse through each step and check min
        // Space Complexity: O(n), to store min values
        
        // Create an array to store the minimum cost of frog jumps for each position
        // Initialise the size of dp array to "n"
        int[] dp = new int[n];

        // Initialize the dp array with -1 to indicate that the minimum cost is not yet computed
        Arrays.fill(dp, -1);

        // Call the helper function to calculate the minimum cost
        helper(n - 1, heights, dp);

        // Return the minimum cost for the last position as "n-1"
        // because it starts from 1st step
        return dp[n - 1];
    }

    // Helper function to calculate the minimum cost of frog jumps
    private static int helper(int n, int[] heights, int[] dp) {
        // Base case: reached the starting position (cost is 0)
        if (n == 0) {
            return 0;
        }

        // If the minimum cost for the current position is already computed, return the precalculated value
        if (dp[n] != -1) {
            return dp[n];
        }

        // Calculate the cost of jumping to the current position from the previous positions
        int left = helper(n - 1, heights, dp) + Math.abs(heights[n] - heights[n - 1]);

        // Initialize the cost of jumping from the position two steps ago as a large value
        int right = Integer.MAX_VALUE;

        // If there is a position two steps ago, calculate the cost of jumping from that position
        if (n > 1) {
            right = helper(n - 2, heights, dp) + Math.abs(heights[n] - heights[n - 2]);
        }

        // Store the minimum cost in the dp array for future use
        return dp[n] = Math.min(left, right);
    }
}

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