Longest Palindromic Subsequence

Problem

Find the length of the longest palindromic subsequence in a string (characters need not be contiguous).

Input:  s = "bbbab"
Output: 4   ("bbbb")

Python Solution

def longest_palindromic_subsequence(s):
    n = len(s)
    dp = [[0] * n for _ in range(n)]
    for i in range(n - 1, -1, -1):
        dp[i][i] = 1
        for j in range(i + 1, n):
            if s[i] == s[j]:
                dp[i][j] = dp[i + 1][j - 1] + 2
            else:
                dp[i][j] = max(dp[i + 1][j], dp[i][j - 1])
    return dp[0][n - 1]

C++ Solution

int longestPalindromicSubsequence(string s) {
    int n = s.size();
    vector<vector<int>> dp(n, vector<int>(n, 0));
    for (int i = n - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
        dp[i][i] = 1;
        for (int j = i + 1; j < n; j++) {
            if (s[i] == s[j]) dp[i][j] = dp[i + 1][j - 1] + 2;
            else dp[i][j] = max(dp[i + 1][j], dp[i][j - 1]);
        }
    }
    return dp[0][n - 1];
}

Java Solution

class Solution {
    public int longestPalindromicSubsequence(String s) {
        int n = s.length();
        int[][] dp = new int[n][n];
        for (int i = n - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
            dp[i][i] = 1;
            for (int j = i + 1; j < n; j++) {
                if (s.charAt(i) == s.charAt(j)) {
                    dp[i][j] = dp[i + 1][j - 1] + 2;
                } else {
                    dp[i][j] = Math.max(dp[i + 1][j], dp[i][j - 1]);
                }
            }
        }
        return dp[0][n - 1];
    }
}

Complexity

Time: O(n²) — every cell of the n x n DP table is filled once. Space: O(n²) for the table; can be reduced to O(n) by keeping only the previous row, since each cell depends only on the row below.