[LeetCode]#1913. Maximum Product Difference Between Two Pairs

Fatboy Slim
1 min readJul 17, 2021

Environment: Python 3.8

Key technique: sorted

The product difference between two pairs (a, b) and (c, d) is defined as (a * b) - (c * d).

  • For example, the product difference between (5, 6) and (2, 7) is (5 * 6) - (2 * 7) = 16.

Given an integer array nums, choose four distinct indices w, x, y, and z such that the product difference between pairs (nums[w], nums[x]) and (nums[y], nums[z]) is maximized.

Return the maximum such product difference.

Example 1:

Input: nums = [5,6,2,7,4]
Output: 34
Explanation: We can choose indices 1 and 3 for the first pair (6, 7) and indices 2 and 4 for the second pair (2, 4).
The product difference is (6 * 7) - (2 * 4) = 34.

Analysis:

  1. sorted it as [2,4,5,6,7]
  2. return sorted location[-1]x[-2] -[0]x[1]

Solution:

class Solution:
def maxProductDifference(self, nums):

return (sorted(nums)[-1]*sorted(nums)[-2])-(sorted(nums)[0]*sorted(nums)[1])

Submissions:

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