Leetcode reflection (1)

1732. Find the Highest Altitude

There is a biker going on a road trip. The road trip consists of n + 1 points at different altitudes. The biker starts his trip on point 0 with altitude equal 0.

You are given an integer array gain of length n where gain[i] is the net gain in altitude between points i and i + 1 for all (0 <= i < n). Return the highest altitude of a point.

Example 1:

Input: gain = [-5,1,5,0,-7]
Output: 1
Explanation: The altitudes are [0,-5,-4,1,1,-6]. The highest is 1.

Example 2:

Input: gain = [-4,-3,-2,-1,4,3,2]
Output: 0
Explanation: The altitudes are [0,-4,-7,-9,-10,-6,-3,-1]. The highest is 0.

Solution:

A straightforward question, the major solution is to successively sum 2 Adjacent elements in the list, just like the example.

My first answer is:

class Solution:
    def largestAltitude(self, gain: List[int]) -> int:
        for i in range(1, len(gain)):
            gain[i] += gain[i -1]
        fixed = max(gain)
        if fixed > 0:
            return fixed
        else:
            return 0

Then, I found another one which used the python API:

class Solution:
    def largestAltitude(self, gain: List[int]) -> int:
        return max(accumulate(gain, initial =0))

One line, and the space complexity is O(1).

My thought after this question is to use Python APIs (such as accumulate()) as much as I can since it probably has been optimized by someone else. Unless I am not so happy with their performance.