Course Schedule Problem LeetCode

There are a total of n courses you have to take, labeled from 0 to n - 1.

Some courses may have prerequisites, for example to take course 0 you have to first take course 1, which is expressed as a pair: [0,1]

Given the total number of courses and a list of prerequisite pairs, is it possible for you to finish all courses?

For example:

2, [[1,0]]

There are a total of 2 courses to take. To take course 1 you should have finished course 0. So it is possible.

2, [[1,0],[0,1]]

There are a total of 2 courses to take. To take course 1 you should have finished course 0, and to take course 0 you should also have finished course 1. So it is impossible.

Note:
The input prerequisites is a graph represented by a list of edges, not adjacency matrices. Read more about how a graph is represented.

click to show more hints.

Hints:

1. This problem is equivalent to finding if a cycle exists in a directed graph. If a cycle exists, no topological ordering exists and therefore it will be impossible to take all courses.
2. Topological Sort via DFS - A great video tutorial (21 minutes) on Coursera explaining the basic concepts of Topological Sort.
3. Topological sort could also be done via BFS.

This problem is popular in LeetCode and GeeksForGeeks A collection of hundreds of interview questions and solutions are available in our blog at Interview Question Solutions

Solution

Source: Java