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Solution: Gas Station

Explore how to apply greedy algorithms to solve the gas station problem efficiently. Learn to determine if a circular route can be completed starting from a gas station by tracking gas and cost. Understand the optimized approach with O(n) time complexity that finds the unique valid start index or returns -1 if none exists.

Statement

There are nn gas stations along a circular route, where the amount of gas at the ithi^{th} station is gas[i].

We have a car with an unlimited gas tank, and it costs cost[i] of gas to travel from the ithi^{th} station to the next (i+1)th(i+1)^{th} ...