House Robber II

Asked byGoogleAmazon

Problem

Same rules as House Robber, except the houses are arranged in a circle, so the first and last houses are adjacent to each other. Return the maximum amount of money you can rob without robbing two adjacent houses.

Examples

Example 1

Input:nums = [2,3,2]

Output:3

Robbing houses 1 and 3 isn't allowed since they're adjacent in the circle.

Example 2

Input:nums = [1,2,3,1]

Output:4

Constraints

1 <= nums.length <= 100

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How to approach it: the 1-D Dynamic Programming pattern

Break a problem into overlapping subproblems along a single dimension — like "the answer up to index i" — solve each one once, and reuse the result instead of recomputing it.

Look for this pattern when

A greedy or purely recursive approach recomputes the same subproblem repeatedly.
The problem asks for a count, a minimum/maximum, or a yes/no reachability over a sequence, where the answer at position `i` depends on answers at earlier positions.

Read the full 1-D Dynamic Programming guide →

Video walkthroughs

Original problem on LeetCode ↗