Recently I stumbled upon on . Basically it goes like this: you have an array of stock prices, and you should calculate the highest profit you could get. For example, you have — the highest profit is . What I didn’t like about the problem was that it didn’t require to find minimum and maximum stock prices you could obtain the best profit with, just the highest profit itself. So I decided to solve it with this clause. Besides, I believe it requires to delve into the nature of this problem a bit deeper. this interview question InterviewCake [2, 1, 4, 10, 7] 10–1 = 9 After hanging around and re-reading the problem for I guess half an hour, hoping to come up with a solution, I decided to draw the diagram of how the stock prices evolve. Here is the simplest beginning: The best profit I could obtain so far is buy for $10 and sell for $20. How could this graph evolve? Well, there are actually only two scenarios that I’m interested in. If the next price is higher than the previous, I have a new highest price, and new highest profit. And if the next price is lower than the previous lowest price, I have a lowest price that I should buy stock for. But I don’t know if later there will be a price that results in a new highest profit. It could be like that: potentially or like that: So I need to introduce a concept of minimum price candidate, that is, a price that could be the one I should buy the stocks for. So when I find myself in point 3, I say that it is a candidate for the next minimum price. And if the stock at point 4 leads to higher profit (or, in other words, the highest ), I pose that the candidate for minimum price actually becomes a minimum price, and the stock that brings me to the highest profit becomes the maximum price, that is, the price I should sell the stocks for. so far So the following code seems fine from the first sight: getMaxProfit( $stocks){$minCandidate = $min = $stocks[0];$max = $stocks[1]; function array **for** ($i = 1; $i < _count_($stocks); $i++) {  
    **if** ($stocks\[$i\] < $minCandidate) {  
        $minCandidate = $stocks\[$i\];  
    } **elseif** ($stocks\[$i\] - $minCandidate > $max - $min) {  
        $max = $stocks\[$i\];  
        $min = $minCandidate;  
    }  
}  

**return** \[$min, $max\]; } But there is a problem. What if stock prices go down the whole day, but the difference between the prices gets lower? For example, with this array — — I get an erroneous result. So I need to calculate the highest profit first, and then refresh if needed: [10, 5, 2, 1] $minCandidate getMaxProfit( $stocks){$minCandidate = $min = $stocks[0];$max = $stocks[1]; function array **for** ($i = 1; $i < _count_($stocks); $i++) {  
    **if** ($stocks\[$i\] - $minCandidate > $max - $min) {  
        $max = $stocks\[$i\];  
        $min = $minCandidate;  
    }  

    **if** ($stocks\[$i\] < $minCandidate) {  
        $minCandidate = $stocks\[$i\];  
    }  
}  

**return** \[$min, $max\]; } That’s it.

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Apple stocks interview question

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