672 Bulb Switcher II

There is a room with n lights which are turned on initially and 4 buttons on the wall. After performing exactly m unknown operations towards buttons, you need to return how many different kinds of status of the n lights could be.

Suppose n lights are labeled as number [1, 2, 3 ..., n], function of these 4 buttons are given below:

  1. Flip all the lights.

  2. Flip lights with even numbers.

  3. Flip lights with odd numbers.

  4. Flip lights with (3k + 1) numbers, k = 0, 1, 2, ...

Example 1:

Input: n = 1, m = 1.
Output: 2
Explanation: Status can be: [on], [off]

Example 2:

Input: n = 2, m = 1.
Output: 3
Explanation: Status can be: [on, off], [off, on], [off, off]

Example 3:

Input: n = 3, m = 1.
Output: 4
Explanation: Status can be: [off, on, off], [on, off, on], [off, off, off], [off, on, on].

Note: n and m both fit in range [0, 1000].

The Idea: I decided to go with a sort of BF approach with minor optimizations to make it become accepted within the limited time frame. Essentially, I built a tree that presented all the unique possible states without any redundancies. Avoiding these redundancies ensured that the time complexity would be < O(4^n) where n is the number of operations. To avoid redundancies I used an unordered_set that ensured that I would only branch of from unique states. Therefore the most I can ever expect to branch from per level will stay bounded by a constant.

Complexity: O(num_ops4(pow(2, lights))) time and O(4*(pow(2, lights))) space

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