- Difficulty: Hard
- Tags: LeetCode, Hard, Memoization, Math, Dynamic Programming, leetcode-964, O(logn / logx), O(logn)
Problem
Given a single positive integer x
, we will write an expression of the form x (op1) x (op2) x (op3) x ...
where each operator op1
, op2
, etc. is either addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division (+
, -
, *
, or /)
. For example, with x = 3
, we might write 3 * 3 / 3 + 3 - 3
which is a value of 3.
When writing such an expression, we adhere to the following conventions:
- The division operator (
/
) returns rational numbers. - There are no parentheses placed anywhere.
- We use the usual order of operations: multiplication and division happen before addition and subtraction.
- It is not allowed to use the unary negation operator (
-
). For example, "x - x
" is a valid expression as it only uses subtraction, but "-x + x
" is not because it uses negation.
We would like to write an expression with the least number of operators such that the expression equals the given target
. Return the least number of operators used.
Example 1:
Input: x = 3, target = 19 Output: 5 Explanation: 3 * 3 + 3 * 3 + 3 / 3. The expression contains 5 operations.
Example 2:
Input: x = 5, target = 501 Output: 8 Explanation: 5 * 5 * 5 * 5 - 5 * 5 * 5 + 5 / 5. The expression contains 8 operations.
Example 3:
Input: x = 100, target = 100000000 Output: 3 Explanation: 100 * 100 * 100 * 100. The expression contains 3 operations.
Constraints:
2 <= x <= 100
1 <= target <= 2 * 108