- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Greedy, Array, Hash Table, Counting, leetcode-2870, O(n), Freq Table
Problem
You are given a 0-indexed array nums
consisting of positive integers.
There are two types of operations that you can apply on the array any number of times:
- Choose two elements with equal values and delete them from the array.
- Choose three elements with equal values and delete them from the array.
Return the minimum number of operations required to make the array empty, or -1
if it is not possible.
Example 1:
Input: nums = [2,3,3,2,2,4,2,3,4] Output: 4 Explanation: We can apply the following operations to make the array empty: - Apply the first operation on the elements at indices 0 and 3. The resulting array is nums = [3,3,2,4,2,3,4]. - Apply the first operation on the elements at indices 2 and 4. The resulting array is nums = [3,3,4,3,4]. - Apply the second operation on the elements at indices 0, 1, and 3. The resulting array is nums = [4,4]. - Apply the first operation on the elements at indices 0 and 1. The resulting array is nums = []. It can be shown that we cannot make the array empty in less than 4 operations.
Example 2:
Input: nums = [2,1,2,2,3,3] Output: -1 Explanation: It is impossible to empty the array.
Constraints:
2 <= nums.length <= 105
1 <= nums[i] <= 106