2873. Maximum-Value-Of-An-Ordered-Triplet-I

So my initial thoughts after reading this question, I thought this was a sliding window question as I thought i, j, k was continuous, however, it does not have to be and once again, I am reminded I’m goofy.

We can still go over this as a sliding window problem but it would be a little bit more complicated than I initially thought..

I reread the question and noticed that a brute force implementation would work here since the length of the array is restricted to 100 numbers.

For brute force: I can iterate through all possible i, j, k and keep track of the maximum value. Return the maximum value at the end.

class Solution(object):
    def maximumTripletValue(self, nums):
        """
        :type nums: List[int]
        :rtype: int
        """
        n = len(nums)
        res = 0

        for i in range(n - 2):
            for j in range(i + 1, n - 1):
                for k in range(j + 1, n):
                    value = (nums[i] - nums[j]) * nums[k]
                    res = max(res, value)

        return res

Time Complexity: O(n^3)

Space Complexity: O(1)

Time Taken: 3m 56s

Extra: Brute force way is kind of boring but I could not think of that optimal solution in the editorial solution… it does seem obvious once you see it though