Solving Questions With Brainpower

main.md

Question

Approach

To solve this problem, I used dynamic programming, working from the end of the list backwards. For each question, I had two choices:

• Skip it and take the max points from the next question.
• Solve it, earn points[i], and skip the next brainpower[i] questions.

I stored the best decision at each index and returned the result from index 0.

Implementation

class Solution:
    def mostPoints(self, questions: List[List[int]]) -> int:
        n = len(questions)
        dp = [0] * (n + 1)

        for i in range(n - 1, -1, -1):
            points, skip = questions[i]
            next_q = i + skip + 1
            solve = points + (dp[next_q] if next_q < n else 0)
            skip = dp[i + 1]
            dp[i] = max(solve, skip)

        return dp[0]

Complexities

• Time: O(n)
• Space: O(n)