Paint House

There are a row of n houses, each house can be painted with one of the three colors: red, blue or green. The cost of painting each house with a certain color is different. You have to paint all the houses such that no two adjacent houses have the same color.

The cost of painting each house with a certain color is represented by a n x 3 cost matrix. For example, costs[0][0] is the cost of painting house 0 with color red; costs[1][2] is the cost of painting house 1 with color green, and so on... Find the minimum cost to paint all houses.

Note:

All costs are positive integers.

Tips:

The 1st row is the prices for the 1st house, we can change the matrix to present sum of prices from the 2nd row. i.e, the costs[1][0] represent minimum price to paint the second house red plus the 1st house.

Code:

public class Solution {
    public int minCost(int[][] costs) {
        if(costs==null||costs.length==0){
            return 0;
        }
        for(int i=1; i<costs.length; i++){
            costs[i][0] += Math.min(costs[i-1][1],costs[i-1][2]);
            costs[i][1] += Math.min(costs[i-1][0],costs[i-1][2]);
            costs[i][2] += Math.min(costs[i-1][1],costs[i-1][0]);
        }
        int n = costs.length-1;
        return Math.min(Math.min(costs[n][0], costs[n][1]), costs[n][2]);
    }
}