leetcode 234. Palindrome Linked List

来源:互联网 发布:linux系统基础教程 编辑:程序博客网 时间:2024/05/14 15:03

Reversing a list is not considered “O(1) space”
It is a common misunderstanding that the space complexity of a program is just how much the size of additional memory space being used besides input. An important prerequisite is neglected the above definition: the input has to be read-only. By definition, changing the input and change it back is not allowed (or the input size should be counted when doing so). Another way of determining the space complexity of a program is to simply look at how much space it has written to. Reversing a singly linked list requires writing to O(n) memory space, thus the space complexities for all “reverse-the-list”-based approaches are O(n), not O(1).

Solving this problem in O(1) space is theoretically impossible due to two simple facts: (1) a program using O(1) space is computationally equivalent to a finite automata, or a regular expression checker; (2) the pumping lemma states that the set of palindrome strings does not form a regular set.

Please change the incorrect problem statement.