Find the total area covered by two rectilinear rectangles in a 2D plane.

Each rectangle is defined by its bottom left corner and top right corner as shown in the figure.

Rectangle Area Assume that the total area is never beyond the maximum possible value of int.

Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the BST.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

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    _______6______
   /              \
___2__          ___8__
   /      \        /      \
   0      _4       7       9
     /  \
     3   5

For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 2 and 8 is 6. Another example is LCA of nodes 2 and 4 is 2, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

You are playing the following Bulls and Cows game with your friend: You write down a number and ask your friend to guess what the number is. Each time your friend makes a guess, you provide a hint that indicates how many digits in said guess match your secret number exactly in both digit and position (called “bulls”) and how many digits match the secret number but locate in the wrong position (called “cows”). Your friend will use successive guesses and hints to eventually derive the secret number.

Example:

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Secret number:  "1807"
Friend's guess: "7810"

Hint:

1 bull and 3 cows. (The bull is 8, the cows are 0, 1 and 7.)

Write a function to return a hint according to the secret number and friend’s guess, use A to indicate the bulls and B to indicate the cows. In the above example, your function should return “1A3B”.

Please note that both secret number and friend’s guess may contain duplicate digits, for example:

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Secret number:  "1123"
Friend's guess: "0111"

In this case, the 1st 1 in friend’s guess is a bull, the 2nd or 3rd 1 is a cow, and your function should return “1A1B”. You may assume that the secret number and your friend’s guess only contain digits, and their lengths are always equal.

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Example 1:

Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]

Output: 5

max. difference = 6-1 = 5 (not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price)

Example 2:

Input: [7, 6, 4, 3, 1]

Output: 0

In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

Determine if a Sudoku is valid, according to: Sudoku Puzzles - The Rules.

The Sudoku board could be partially filled, where empty cells are filled with the character ‘.’.

A partially filled sudoku which is valid.

Note:

A valid Sudoku board (partially filled) is not necessarily solvable. Only the filled cells need to be validated.

Given a string containing just the characters ‘(’, ‘)’, ‘{’, ‘}’, ‘[’ and ‘]’, determine if the input string is valid.

The brackets must close in the correct order, “()” and “()[]{}” are all valid but “(]” and “([)]” are not.

Given a string s1, we may represent it as a binary tree by partitioning it to two non-empty substrings recursively.

Below is one possible representation of s1 = “great”:

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great
   /    \
  gr    eat
 / \    /  \
g   r  e   at
       / \
      a   t

To scramble the string, we may choose any non-leaf node and swap its two children.

For example, if we choose the node “gr” and swap its two children, it produces a scrambled string “rgeat”.

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rgeat
   /    \
  rg    eat
 / \    /  \
r   g  e   at
       / \
      a   t

We say that “rgeat” is a scrambled string of “great”.

Similarly, if we continue to swap the children of nodes “eat” and “at”, it produces a scrambled string “rgtae”.

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rgtae
   /    \
  rg    tae
 / \    /  \
r   g  ta  e
   / \
  t   a

We say that “rgtae” is a scrambled string of “great”.

Given two strings s1 and s2 of the same length, determine if s2 is a scrambled string of s1.

Follow up for N-Queens problem.

Now, instead outputting board configurations, return the total number of distinct solutions.

Given a string S, you are allowed to convert it to a palindrome by adding characters in front of it. Find and return the shortest palindrome you can find by performing this transformation.

Example:

Given “aacecaaa”, return “aaacecaaa”.

Given “abcd”, return “dcbabcd”.

Given a singly linked list, group all odd nodes together followed by the even nodes. Please note here we are talking about the node number and not the value in the nodes.

You should try to do it in place. The program should run in O(1) space complexity and O(nodes) time complexity.

Example:

Given 1->2->3->4->5->NULL,

return 1->3->5->2->4->NULL.

Note:

The relative order inside both the even and odd groups should remain as it was in the input.

The first node is considered odd, the second node even and so on …