Leetcode solution 207. Course Schedule

Problem Statement 

There are a total of numCourses courses you have to take, labeled from 0 to numCourses-1.

Some courses may have prerequisites, for example to take course 0 you have to first take course 1, which is expressed as a pair: [0,1]

Given the total number of courses and a list of prerequisite pairs, is it possible for you to finish all courses?

 

Example 1:

Input: numCourses = 2, prerequisites = [[1,0]]
Output: true
Explanation: There are a total of 2 courses to take. 
             To take course 1 you should have finished course 0. So it is possible.

Example 2:

Input: numCourses = 2, prerequisites = [[1,0],[0,1]]
Output: false
Explanation: There are a total of 2 courses to take. 
             To take course 1 you should have finished course 0, and to take course 0 you should
             also have finished course 1. So it is impossible.

 

Constraints:

• The input prerequisites is a graph represented by a list of edges, not adjacency matrices. Read more about how a graph is represented.
• You may assume that there are no duplicate edges in the input prerequisites.
• 1 <= numCourses <= 10^5

 Problem link

Video Tutorial

You can find the detailed video tutorial here

• Youtube
• Youtube BFS in 2015, Youtube DFS in 2015
  
• B站

Thought Process

It is a classic dependency graph problem. We can translate this problem to direct if there is a cycle in a directed graph or not. A text book solution is Kahn's algorithm for topological sorting. We can have a simple way to represent the graph or use a more proper adjacency lists (a little bit overkill for this problem though)

Solutions

Use adjacency lists BFS

Time Complexity: O(V), since each vertex is visited only once during BFS
Space Complexity: O(V+E) since we use adjacency lists to represent a directed graph

Use simple hashmap BFS

Time Complexity: O(V), since each vertex is visited only once during BFS

Space Complexity: O(V) since we are using a hashmap

Use recursion DFS

Time Complexity: O(V), since each vertex is visited only once during BFS

Space Complexity: O(V) since we used a lookup hashmap for memorization purpose (not considering function stack space)

References

• Leetcode official solution
• GeeksforGeeks Detect Cycle in a directly graph using topological sort