Problem Description
You have a long flowerbed in which some of the plots are planted, and some are not. However, flowers cannot be planted in adjacent plots. Given an integer array flowerbed containing 0's and 1's, where 0 means empty and 1 means not empty, and an integer n, return true if n new flowers can be planted in the flowerbed without violating the no-adjacent-flowers rule and false otherwise.
Key Insights
- A flower can only be planted in a plot if it is empty (0) and both adjacent plots are also empty (0).
- The problem can be approached by iterating through the flowerbed array and counting how many flowers can be planted based on the current plot and its neighbors.
- Careful management of the index boundaries is required to avoid out-of-bounds errors.
Space and Time Complexity
Time Complexity: O(m), where m is the length of the flowerbed array.
Space Complexity: O(1), as we are using a constant amount of space.
Solution
The solution involves iterating through the flowerbed array and checking each plot. If a plot is empty and both adjacent plots (if they exist) are also empty, a flower can be planted in that plot. We keep a count of how many flowers have been planted. If at any point the count reaches n, we can return true. If the loop finishes and the count is less than n, we return false.