Watch 10 video solutions for Sort Array by Moving Items to Empty Space, a hard level problem involving Array, Greedy, Sorting. This walkthrough by Greg Hogg has 401,254 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
You are given an integer array nums of size n containing each element from 0 to n - 1 (inclusive). Each of the elements from 1 to n - 1 represents an item, and the element 0 represents an empty space.
In one operation, you can move any item to the empty space. nums is considered to be sorted if the numbers of all the items are in ascending order and the empty space is either at the beginning or at the end of the array.
For example, if n = 4, nums is sorted if:
nums = [0,1,2,3] ornums = [1,2,3,0]...and considered to be unsorted otherwise.
Return the minimum number of operations needed to sort nums.
Example 1:
Input: nums = [4,2,0,3,1] Output: 3 Explanation: - Move item 2 to the empty space. Now, nums = [4,0,2,3,1]. - Move item 1 to the empty space. Now, nums = [4,1,2,3,0]. - Move item 4 to the empty space. Now, nums = [0,1,2,3,4]. It can be proven that 3 is the minimum number of operations needed.
Example 2:
Input: nums = [1,2,3,4,0] Output: 0 Explanation: nums is already sorted so return 0.
Example 3:
Input: nums = [1,0,2,4,3] Output: 2 Explanation: - Move item 2 to the empty space. Now, nums = [1,2,0,4,3]. - Move item 3 to the empty space. Now, nums = [1,2,3,4,0]. It can be proven that 2 is the minimum number of operations needed.
Constraints:
n == nums.length2 <= n <= 1050 <= nums[i] < nnums are unique.