Question

link

A robot is located at the top-left corner of a m x n grid (marked 'Start' in the diagram below).

The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked 'Finish' in the diagram below).

How many possible unique paths are there?


Above is a 3 x 7 grid. How many possible unique paths are there?

Note: m and n will be at most 100.

Stats

Frequency 3
Difficulty 2
Adjusted Difficulty 2
Time to use --------

Ratings/Color = 1(white) 2(lime) 3(yellow) 4/5(red)

Solution

This is an easy question.

Basically to walk from (0,0) to (m,n), robot have to walk down (m-1) steps and rightward (n-1) steps. Then this problem simply becomes Number of k-combinations (also known as choose m from n problem). The code is just concise and short.

My code

public class Solution {
    public int uniquePaths(int m, int n) {
        m--;
        n--;
        if (m < 0 || n < 0) {
            return 0;
        } else if (m == 0 || n == 0) {
            return 1;
        }
        long sum = 1;
        // the answer would be "choose m from (m + n)"
        if (m > n) {
            int temp = m;
            m = n;
            n = temp;
        }
        int num = m + n;
        for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) {
            sum *= (num - i);
        }
        for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) {
            sum /= (i + 1);
        }
        return (int) sum;
    }
}