- Difficulty: Hard
- Tags: LeetCode, Hard, Array, Math, Dynamic Programming, Sorting, leetcode-1478, O(m * n^2), O(n), DP, Median
Problem
Given the array houses
where houses[i]
is the location of the ith
house along a street and an integer k
, allocate k
mailboxes in the street.
Return the minimum total distance between each house and its nearest mailbox.
The test cases are generated so that the answer fits in a 32-bit integer.
Example 1:
Input: houses = [1,4,8,10,20], k = 3 Output: 5 Explanation: Allocate mailboxes in position 3, 9 and 20. Minimum total distance from each houses to nearest mailboxes is |3-1| + |4-3| + |9-8| + |10-9| + |20-20| = 5
Example 2:
Input: houses = [2,3,5,12,18], k = 2 Output: 9 Explanation: Allocate mailboxes in position 3 and 14. Minimum total distance from each houses to nearest mailboxes is |2-3| + |3-3| + |5-3| + |12-14| + |18-14| = 9.
Constraints:
1 <= k <= houses.length <= 100
1 <= houses[i] <= 104
- All the integers of
houses
are unique.