SDE - 1

You are given a positive integer 'N’. Your task is to find and return the minimum number of steps that 'N' has to take to get reduced to 1.

You can perform any one of the following 3 steps:

1) Subtract 1 from it. (n = n - ­1) ,
2) If n is divisible by 2, divide by 2.( if n % 2 == 0, then n = n / 2 ) ,
3) If n is divisible by 3, divide by 3. (if n % 3 == 0, then n = n / 3 ).

For example:

Given:
‘N’ = 4, it will take 2 steps to reduce it to 1, i.e., first divide it by 2 giving 2 and then subtract 1, giving 1.

You are given a string 'str' of length 'N'.

Your task is to return the longest palindromic substring. If there are multiple strings, return any.

A substring is a contiguous segment of a string.

For example :

str = "ababc"

The longest palindromic substring of "ababc" is "aba", since "aba" is a palindrome and it is the longest substring of length 3 which is a palindrome. 

There is another palindromic substring of length 3 is "bab". Since starting index of "aba" is less than "bab", so "aba" is the answer.

Given a text and a wildcard pattern of size N and M respectively, implement a wildcard pattern matching algorithm that finds if the wildcard pattern is matched with the text. The matching should cover the entire text not partial text.

The wildcard pattern can include the characters ‘?’ and ‘*’

 ‘?’ – matches any single character 
 ‘*’ – Matches any sequence of characters(sequence can be of length 0 or more)

Consider a directed graph of ‘N’ nodes where each node is labeled from ‘0’ to ‘N - 1’. Each edge of the graph is either ‘red’ or ‘blue’ colored. The graph may contain self-edges or parallel edges. You are given two arrays, ‘redEdges’ and ‘blueEdges’, whose each element is of the form [i, j], denoting an edge from node ‘i’ to node ‘j’ of the respective color.

Your task is to compute an array ‘answer’ of size ‘N’, where ‘answer[i]’ stores the length of the shortest path from node ‘0’ to node ‘i’ such that the edges along the path have alternate colors. If there is no such path from node ‘0’ to ‘i’, then ‘answer[i] = -1’.

Example:

N = 4, redEdges = [[0, 1], [2, 3]], blueEdges = [[1, 2], [1, 3]]

The shortest paths for each node from node ‘0’ are:
1: 0->1         Length: 1
2: 0->1->2      Length: 2
3: 0->1->3      Length: 2
So, the ‘answer’ array will be: [0, 1, 2, 2].

Note:

1. The given graph could be a disconnected graph.

2. Any two nodes ‘i’ and ‘j’ can have at most one red edge from ‘i’ to ‘j’ and at most one blue edge from ‘i’ to ‘j’.