Min Cost Climbing Stairs

Category

DP - 1D

Checkbox

Difficulty

Easy

Index

Key Ideas

The key idea to solve the "Min Cost Climbing Stairs" problem is to use dynamic programming to calculate the minimum cost of reaching the top of the stairs by either taking one or two steps at a time.

Problem Number

746

Problem Summary

The "Min Cost Climbing Stairs" problem, categorized under Dynamic Programming, involves finding the minimum cost to reach the top of a staircase. The key idea is that at each step, you can either climb one or two steps with a specific cost associated with each step. A potential pitfall is to overlook the fact that you can start at either the 0th or 1st step, leading to different approaches and edge cases to consider.

Solution Summary

The best solution for the "Min Cost Climbing Stairs" problem involves using dynamic programming. We can create an array to store the minimum cost to reach each step. We start from the third step and calculate the minimum cost to reach each step by taking the minimum of the cost to reach the previous two steps plus the cost of the current step. Finally, we return the minimum cost between the last two steps, which represents the minimum cost to reach the top of the stairs. This solution has a time complexity of O(n) and a space complexity of O(1), where n is the number of steps in the input array.